Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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If there’s one story that irrefutably establishes the corrupt nature of Governor Andrew Cuomo, Governor Corruptocrat here at NaturalGasNOW, this is it.

When I labeled Andrew Cuomo as Governor Corruptocrat on these pages, some readers cheered. Others winced. I’ve stuck with it because I know it to be correct. Governor Corruptocrat is an apt description of a man who does absolutely nothing in his official capacity that is not designed to reward him personally. We all operate out of self-interest, of course, but our conscience and moral education drives most of us to selfless acts of responsibility to our communities on occasion at least. Not so with Andrew Cuomo, at least when he’s acting out his gubernatorial role. He’s 100% Governor Corruptocrat and what he’s done with respect to nursing homes proves it.

An outstanding investigative story in Yahoo News speaks to Governor Corruptocrat’s and the corruption endemic to his administration. Here are a few excerpts:

As Governor Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful healthcare industry group suddenly poured more than $1m into a Democratic committee backing his campaign.

Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for healthcare industry officials, according to legal experts.

Critics say Cuomo removed a key deterrent against nursing home and hospital corporations cutting corners in ways that jeopardize lives. As those critics now try to repeal the provision during this final week of Albany’s legislative session, they assert that data prove such immunity is correlating to higher nursing home death rates during the pandemic – both in New York and in other states enacting similar immunity policies.

New York has become one of the globe’s major pandemic hotspots – and the center of the state’s outbreak has been nursing homes, where more than 5,000 New Yorkers have died, according to Associated Press data.

Those deaths have occurred as Cuomo’s critics say he has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the healthcare industry interests that helped bankroll his election campaign. In March, Cuomo’s administration issued an order that allowed nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Amid allegations of undercounted casualties, the governor also pushed back against pressure to have state regulators more stringently record and report death rates in nursing homes.

And then came Cuomo’s annual budget – which included a little-noticed passage shielding corporate officials who run New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities from liability for Covid-related eaths and injuries.

GNYHA logo

GNYHA – a lobbying group for hospital systems, including some that own nursing homes – said it “drafted and aggressively advocated for” the immunity provision. The new law declares that top officials at hospital and nursing home companies “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to address the Covid-19 outbreak.

Prior to the budget language, Cuomo had already temporarily granted limited legal immunity to doctors and nurses serving on the medical frontlines. But the carefully sculpted passage buried in the state’s annual spending bill expanded that by offering extensive immunity to any “healthcare facility administrator, executive, supervisor, board member, trustee or other person responsible for directing, supervising or managing a healthcare facility and its personnel or other individual in a comparable role”.

New York is now one of just two states to shield those corporate officials from both civil lawsuits and some forms of criminal prosecution by the government, according to an analysis by Syracuse University law professor Nina Kohn and the University of Houston’s Jessica L Roberts.

“New York is an outlier and has the most explicit and sweeping immunity language,” Kohn said.

Read the entire thing for the gory details of just how Governor Corruptocrat operates. This is why December 17, 2014 was a day of infamy in New York. The gas industry and the landowners didn’t pony up the donations to his campaign as he fully expected. Both were naive as to the ways of Tammany Hall that define politics in New York City and Albany. The Rockefeller family was there, though, for Governor Corruptocrat with the hapless but very rich Larry, Jr. even doing a video advertisement for Governor Corruptocrat two months before that decision and one month before the gubernatorial election that year:

Again, read the whole thing to get the full picture of Governor Corruptocrat. He is a control freak and twists his agencies and his own explanations into pretzels for the sake of what is, in effect, graft in the form of campaign donations and support. This is how Governor Corruptocrat has corrupted everything in New York government. He didn’t start it, of course, but he’s transformed it into a strange art form where gobs of green are thrown at a canvas and the work is lauded in return, despite its lack of artistic value.

I’s also, effectively, a protection racket, where Governor Corruptocrat has shieded nursing home owners from liability for the actions he forced them to take because he knew he could. They were owned; they were his to do with what he willed. He callously wrote off everyone’s aged mother but his own to cover up what he failed to do in being prepared at hospitals.

I don’t judge Andrew Cuomo as a human being. He may be a wonderful son and father; I’m prepared to believe that. But, I do judge his performance as governor and he richly deserves the title of Governor Corruptocrat.