The Gothamist article is hilarious, but the spokesperson here is a political idiot. “Upstate New York Secessionists Demand Freedom From City They Mooch Off Of“:
On Sunday, a few hundred people rallied in Bainbridge, New York, a village of 3,300 between Binghamton and Oneonta, to promote the idea of upstate secession. The protest was organized by a group called the Divide New York Caucus, which wants to sever the state above Rockland and Westchester counties. Because actually seceding would require state legislative and congressional approval, man-with-a-dream John Bergener Jr. proposes divvying the state into two autonomous regions through a voter referendum, calling the new one New Amsterdam, and leaving a figurehead legislature in place at the state level. The pie-in-the-sky scheme is no mere intellectual exercise, its architect insists…
The rally included Tea Party, gun rights, and pro-fracking groups bitter about downstate voters’ support for the state’s fracking ban and the gun-sale-and-storage-restricting SAFE Act. There was also some innuendo about upstate supporting New York City, in the form of a flyer promoting the rally that depicts a beaver chewing into a tree, with the trunk representing upstate and the upper portion representing the city, and the slogan “The Beaver shall not allow the Roots to feed the Tree. Instead the Roots will grow a new branch.”
If we’re talking economics, the case for secession is stronger on the New York City side—because upstaters are a bunch of moochers. In an analysis of state finances for fiscal year 2010, the Rockefeller Institute [pdf] found that New York City pays 45 percent of the state’s taxes and other revenues, and receives just 40 percent of expenditures, a gap of about $4 billion…
Tragically, so is this guy, who has both the brains and the education to know better. Per TPM News:
Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig says his presidential exploratory committee has reached the $1-million benchmark he said would trigger a formal White House bid.
The Democrat announced his fundraising total in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
Lessig says he’s running to address campaign finance reform, voting rights issues and “political gerrymandering.”
Should he achieve his agenda as president, the 54-year-old South Dakota native promises to resign and let his vice president take over.
He declined to name potential vice presidential picks when asked during the interview…
Go home, Professor Lessig, you’re drunk.
The only way this “campaign” rises above a minor irritant, like contact dermatitis from a cheap wristband, is if by some cascade of unlikely accidents Lessig manages to turn into Nader 2016. In which case I would have to hunt him down personally — unless Bernie Sanders beats me to it, as would be his right.
redshirt
I support Bane.
Mike J
Lessig is at heart a good guy who doesn’t take politics seriously enough. If he did, he wouldn’t pull a stunt like this.
Nutella
Why is it always the people who are getting the subsidies who are convinced they are the contributors and the everyone else is the moochers?
The west and south are so sure their federal taxes are subsidizing the north and east, when it’s the other way around. The suburbs are so sure they’re subsidizing the cities, when it’s the other way around. Homeowners are so sure their property taxes are subsidizing the apartment dwellers, when it’s the other way around. People on Medicare rally against government assistance programs.
The “I deserve what I get but those people over there are all moochers” attitude is so common.
redshirt
I know an article titled “Lowest Unemployment since the 1980’s” would be too pro-Obama but maybe one of you front pagers could make it happen along those lines?
Gex
@Nutella: They’ve been told these things by their politicians and their clergy for several decades now.
ThresherK
The pic in the link has six phrases and only three fonts.
That’s progress! The last time I read anything about them they had five fonts on one pic.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@redshirt: You read the wrong blog
Redshift
@Nutella: Because the areas they’re complaining about are populated by the wrong sort of people, so they can’t possibly be as virtuous and productive as real Muricans!
Mike G
The rural right-wing north of my county whine every decade or so about seceding from us evul libruls in the southern part because apparently we won’t let them rape the landscape with sufficient impunity. Then someone will realize they consume 60% of the county revenue while contributing 40%, and would have to seriously raise taxes or slash services on themselves; so they shut up for a few years until the next generation of tantrum-throwing conservative fantasists gains power.
Redshift
Early contender for “whiniest article of the week”:
Obama’s interview with Rolling Stone in Alaska raises questions on access
Passive voice? Check.
Complaints that matter to no one but the press pool presented as important issues? Check.
And so on.
Peale
Hello. rockland county here. we shall be keeping Orange, Dutchess and Putnam. Good luck with the rump.
Peale
@efgoldman: I wonder about that. My guess is that Albany is a good point. Corruption to the south of Albany always seems to involve real estate for commercial and residential development. North and west, the corruption comes from real estate for natural resource exploitation. I think Albany is a good meeting point for our two types of corruption.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: The dead deserve more respect.
trollhattan
@Nutella:
I’ve never seen anyone run the numbers for the proposed “State of Jefferson” so very much the wet dream of certain rural northern Californians, but it’s not a stretch to presume it would instantly become a moocher state on the level of an Alabama. The industries are extractive, many conducted on [ahem] federal land and not exactly being done in a sustainable manner. I suppose they think they’d just magically own Shasta and Oroville dams and lakes, and would make money hand over fist selling water to the remains of California. Or, maybe let’s make I-5 a tollroad.
Good luck with all that, goobers.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: I went away for the weekend. I helped build things. I played croquet. I ate a lot of pork. It was a good weekend.
BBA
That plan won’t work. Cuomo lives in Westchester so he’d still be governor-for-life of the city and environs. On the other hand I lived in Westchester as a child and I like it too much to see it get stuck with the upstate wackaloons AND Cuomo.
Can we just make Cuomo’s house in Mt Kisco its own state?
JMV Pyro
I see that my state wants to try at their own version of that California succession scheme that went nowhere.
ThresherK
@Peale: Hello, lifelong Nutmegger here. I was wondering how those would-be secessioners in Oneonta &c thought that an area including I-84 and Poughkeepsie, for example, didn’t think of itself as NYC metro.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth. — Voltaire
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: To be honest, Friday night was a traditional WI fish fry. I cheated and had shrimp, but whatever.
I know a guy who can get you some bacon seeds. It might cost you a bit, they are good. Want me to make a couple of calls?
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Which they won’t get from the writers efg referenced. So there….
trollhattan
@efgoldman:
Suspect like the plague they’ll remain endemic in that area, just not very successful. The Tim Draper split-it-into-six didn’t qualify for the ballot, but perhaps he’ll decide to blow his money some other way. Maybe a Hawaiian island like Larry.
benw
I’m thinking AL is a little like Arnold in the first Terminator: “And she won’t stop! EVER! Until you are DEAD!”
trollhattan
@efgoldman:
Jeez, have not seen The Mouse that Roared in decades. Would like to one of these days.
Peale
@efgoldman: don’t you live in Connecticut? How much smaller do you want it to be?
benw
Because I can’t stop posting youtube links, New Amsterdam made me think of this.
Peale
@efgoldman: I guess you could exploit the natural division between the Rhode Islanders and the Providence Plantationese
Steeplejack (phone)
Coming up at 1 a.m. EDT on Fox: Restoring America’s Greatness: An Hour with Dick and Liz Cheney, hosted by Sean Hannity. Words fail.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack (phone): Gah! Ack! Pfft!
divF
@efgoldman:
RI is likely the most-anything state on a per-square mile basis, owing to its lack of square miles.
trollhattan
@Steeplejack (phone):
I demand it be sponsored by this. Nothing says “restored greatness” like Bud Light Clamato.
trollhattan
@efgoldman:
Just looked it up, RI is a smidge over 1,200 sq mi. We not only have larger counties, some counties have larger carbuncles than that. Lovely San Berdoo (coastal mile count: 0) is 20k sq mi. Are your counties the size of large lawns?
ThresherK
@efgoldman: There’s gotta be a Schroedinger’s Cat term for all those new flavors of Bud Light.
Bud Light Clamato? Without clicking on the link–going with my own gut–I am hopelessly undecided as to betting whether it exists or doesn’t. Whether it’s the worst-sounding thing with Bud Light in it (a crowded field) or someone’s incredibly almost lifelike joke.
If it does exist, I’ll try it after I try Pumpkin Spice Peeps.
Anne Laurie
@ThresherK: I was fond of Clamato forty years ago, when I was a teenager and it was just being commercialized. I vaguely remember tv ads suggesting it was based on a non-alcohol version of a Bloody Mary, but the Wikipedia link chastely suggests Manhattan-style tomato-based clam chowder as its inspiration. One has to assume its subsequent history as a mixer grew from the desire of those without access to more expensive intoxicants to disguise the flavor of cheap crappy commercial beer?
(I mean, McDonald’s didn’t take over the highway rest stops because it was good food, just because it was cheap and predictable, unlike local ‘artisan’ diners.)
mclaren
Can someone please unleash the Boston Dynamics cheetah robots on Lawrence Lessig’s ass to hunt him down and chew his guts into violin strings?
mclaren
@trollhattan:
If you want an example of true horror, consider this: Budweiser corporation markets a pre-mixed combination of beer + clamato juice called “chelada.”
The Latino community apparently loves it…
J R in WV
@Omnes Omnibus:
Omnes, what did you help build? One of my hobbies, work parties to help build something, usually someone’s new home.
Another Holocene Human
@redshirt:
Pay and working conditions like the 90s would be nice. Obama did his best to fix DOL, so now the unions will have to do their bit.
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman:
They thought it would be less corrupt. In hindsight, didn’t quite work out that way.
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman: Hey, when they reported on that local pol who told the press they weren’t allowed to print his name without his permission, that was a public service!
Nutella
@Mike J:
What’s the evidence for that?
Another Holocene Human
@efgoldman:
A chilly, windy place for shady people.
Yeah, the urban politics are corrupt as hell, but so is Boston (omg). RI really shines in the giant tax breaks on robber barons front. That’s why they can’t pay for shit. And I still don’t think it can lay a finger on corruption, Deep South style. That’s the kind of corruption dirty money just can’t buy. You need a long history of real life terrorism.
PaulW
Every state, I think, goes through an internal secessionist movement of its own. I remember reports about Nebraska’s western region railing against the more populated, more “urbanized” eastern half.
Florida has this: South Florida has a movement to secede over the climate change issue as the Dade/Broward/Palm Beach region is getting flooded over at an alarming rate and Tallahassee is DOING NOTHING about it.
lol
A good way to shut this type of stuff up is to push for a law or initiative requiring that state spending be done proportional to taxes paid to the state.
Johannes
Re Grand Fenwick: the books are far, far superior to the movie. The scheming Count of Mountjoy, the beautiful and ingenious as well as ingenuous Gloriana XII, good-hearted David Bentner–McKern was great casting–are all wonderful characters.
cokane
Don’t fear Lessig, way too esoteric a figure to gain even Naderian traction in an election. Also I suspect some loony right winger will run 3rd party, since the whoever the R nominee is, he won’t be satisfactory to all.
JimGod
How come someone be a Nader when he’s running in the Democratic primary? I don’t understand comments to that effect, whether it’s Lessig or Sanders. By doing what they’re doing, they will only be on the ballot next November by winning the most delegates to the convention. By default, they cannot be spoilers. People need to chill out.
PurpleGirl
The upstate counties have been pissed at NYC for the land restrictions protecting the watershed since NYC began to build their water system. I think the upstate counties should be glad to have THEIR water protected at the same time — look at the problems of ground water is areas that have allowed fracking. And it’s not a complete economic solution. The Smithsonian Channel had a series on a town in North Dakota (IIRC) that was becoming a boom town from fracking and then when oil prices began falling the town began losing money as the oil wasn’t being bought.
I’ve never complained about sharing my tax money with them But if they’re that butthurt, then maybe there are things in NYC I’d prefer to use that tax money for — say, more money for the transit system and let upstate pay for their own damn roads by themselves.
David Margolies
The split New York State thing has come up before. The question is, which part gets the name ‘New York’. There was a New Yorker cartoon whenever the last time was, with an upper east side man saying to his wife ‘I say we call it New York and let the apple pickers choose a new name.”