Saying Goodbye to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michael Gianaris

I congratulate Erie County's Assemblyman David DiPietro (R-NY) for introducing A05498, a bill that would divide New York into three autonomous regions: New Amsterdam, New York City, and Montauk.  It proposes regional governors and legislators, and it limits statewide taxation to a sales tax. It also proposes that state court and prison systems be separated.  

In an emailed press release, the Divide NYS Caucus Inc. says that under the bill a token New York State government would remain, with most taxing power transferred to regional governments. About three-fourths of state laws would become regional laws. Each region would have its own legislature and regional governor.  

When I lived in Northern New York (the region north of the Adirondacks, running along the Canadian border  from Plattsburgh to Watertown) in the early 1990s, I scoffed at some who advocated separating upstate from New York City.  Most of the state's revenue came from Wall Street and other New York City industries. Nevertheless, since the 1910s the city has eliminated growth in upstate New York.  Some of this is the aim of elite upstate landowners such as Kingsman Gould and the Rockefeller family, who will almost certainly be opposed to this proposal because it would end their environmentalist bullying of the people of the Adirondacks and Catskills.  

My own neighborhood, the Town of Olive in Ulster County, has been subject to the  rapacious theft of land to build reservoirs and impose costly regulation that saves the city's inhabitants billions each year. The city's corrupt,  imperialist history is outlined in Professor David Soll's Empire of Water.

The plugging of fracking proposals for the Southern Tier handed Pennsylvania massive economic opportunities and had zero effect on the environment. New York consumes the same amount of natural gas as it would have, only it buys it from Pennsylvania instead of producing it.  Better that  the people of the Southern Tier should be forced onto the welfare rolls and forced into long-term poverty than they should earn good wages in the energy business.  The people of New York City are true geniuses, as they   frequently claim about themselves.

More recently, the grotesque performance of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Michael Gianaris with respect to Amazon.com gives new meaning to the term "jerk."  Given New York's national leadership in taxation and bloated state and city governments, after the $3 billion in tax breaks, Amazon would have probably  been paying more in taxes than the majority of Fortune 500 corporations. That's a brilliant reason to deprive the state of 25,000 jobs that pay $150,000 on average. (Disclaimer: I own an apartment 1.8 miles from the site on the Long Island City/Ocasio-Cortez border on the Long Island City side, and I saw my property value rise and then sink by 20%.) 

With the media attention paid to Ocasio-Cortez, the people of New York City look like jerks now more than ever. It is time to end the pain that they are imposing on upstate New York.