When a millionaire calls the thousandaire 'rich,' New Jersey's progressive hero calls BS

The air in New York City is thick, a stew of heat and grievance. From the shadows, the disgraced prince emerges not with a mea culpa, but with a blade, aiming to carve up the working class with surgical precision.

His target: a state assemblyman in a rent-stabilized apartment. His method: an old, tired playbook. Divide. Conquer. Let them fight over the crumbs.

Andrew Cuomo, from his multi-million dollar perch, took to the digital square to point a finger at Zohran Mamdani.

The crime? Making a living wage and living in Astoria. The sentence? Immediate eviction, a public shaming to hand the keys to the unhoused. A moral crusade, he called it.

It smelled more like a distraction, a cheap trick to make a teacher and a nurse see an enemy in a social worker, and not in the man who once held the power to fix the housing crisis but instead let it fester.

Into this fray steps Lisa McCormick, a Jersey fist in a velvet glove.

The anti-establishment progressive champion doesn’t shout. She states, with the cold clarity of a ledger. She sees the former governor’s net worth, a cool $10 million, and his definition of “very rich” — a couple pulling in two hundred grand in a city that eats paychecks for breakfast.

She called it for what it is: a con job. A scheme to pit the barely-hanging-on against the barely-making-it, so neither notices the real money being vacuumed up to the penthouse suites.

"The people without enough to live are not being oppressed by those who barely have enough to live," said McCormick. "They are being cheated by those who have far more than they need, which is why I proposed a $50 million limit on personal fortunes, inspired by Huey Long's Share Our Wealth plan."

For 80 percent of Americans, the cost of living exceeds take-home pay, according to expert analysis recently cited by McCormick. The class war in this country is real, but it should not divide those who are struggling to get by and those who are struggling to keep their heads above water.

However, McCormick's ire isn’t reserved solely for the exiled governor from across the river. It travels down the Turnpike to Washington, to a senator with a gleaming smile and a list of billionaire backers a mile long. She unspools another history, a colder betrayal.

She recalls when Cory Booker, the Garden State senator primarily working for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, had a choice. The Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, a man from the party’s progressive wing, needed validation. He got silence.

But McCormick’s memory is long. She remembers when the nominee was a different Democrat, Bill Thompson, and the opponent was a Republican billionaire who had hijacked the electoral process, who had tossed out the term limits the people had voted for.

That Republican, Mike Bloomberg, didn’t get silence from Booker. He got an endorsement.

The point is not lost. The pattern is clear.

A billionaire rewrites the rules to run illegally? The senator is there. A working-class candidate wins the nomination fair and square? The senator is absent.

The math is simple, and McCormick does it aloud: at least four dozen billionaires have donated money to Booker, who has raised nearly $100 million during his career. That’s a lot of campaign contributions. That’s a lot of strings being pulled.

So the street fight, Cuomo wants you to watch, is a sham like Street Fight, a 2005 documentary film by Marshall Curry that showed Booker is a loser.

The real fight is against the entire rotten calculus that allows a millionaire to lecture a thousandaire about greed while a senator calculates the benefits of standing with the billionaires.

McCormick’s condemnation is a stark, Jersey-no-nonsense thing. It’s a proposal she once laid out, a line drawn in the sand: fifty million dollars. That’s the limit. After that, we share the wealth.

It’s an old idea, from a louder, angrier time. But in this quiet, dispassionate recounting of facts and betrayals, it sounds less like a dream and more like the only sane response left.

The modern "Share Our Wealth" plan

McCormick's proposals reframe Long's original concepts for the modern era, with a focus on wealth redistribution through changes to the tax code.

Key planks of McCormick's plan include:

Cap large fortunes: McCormick has publicly advocated for capping personal fortunes. Sources report different figures she has supported over time, from capping personal fortunes at $50 million in June 2025 to limiting the annual income of any person to 100 to 300 times the size of the average family income.

Eliminate the Social Security cap: A cornerstone of her plan is to "scrap the cap" on Social Security earnings, requiring high earners to contribute at the same rate as all other wage earners. The revenue would be used to expand benefits and secure the fund's long-term solvency.

Fund public works: McCormick's platform supports funding public works and investments through the taxation of large fortunes, similar to the original Share Our Wealth proposals.

The policy papers are just the wrapping. The real message is the wrecking ball.

Lisa McCormick isn’t trying to tweak the system. She’s attempting to break it, and the progressive group Democrats for Change wants her to take on Booker next year.

Democrats for Change says the entire political establishment—the ones like Booker and Cuomo who kowtow to billionaires with tax cuts and corporate welfare while forcing austerity on the rest of us—has to go.

They’ve built a country where working people live in constant fear, clinging to the little they have, while the rich get richer off their backs.

McCormick's plan isn’t just a list of proposals. It’s an eviction notice. Throw the bums out. All of them, including Cuomo and Booker.