If you want evidence that the Occupy Wall Street protests have already had a salutary effect on politics and policy making in the US, look no further than the state where the movement was born: New York. In a surprising development, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will convene a special legislative session this week to work toward progressive tax reform, increased infrastructure spending, and job training programs for inner-city youth.

Those who live outside the state may not understand how potentially significant a shift this is. In last year’s gubernatorial race, Cuomo campaigned as the kinder, gentler Tea Party candidate. He ran on a sharply neoliberal program that called for tax and spending cuts and attacks on the state’s public sector labor unions. His positions were virtually indistinguishable from those of his GOP opponent, the truly cretinous teabagger Carl Paladino, whose campaign ran aground on bestiality jokes and calls to house welfare recipients in the state’s prison system. He single-handedly organized an executive committee of the state’s ruling class to support his campaign and his legislative program. Once in office, he danced the classic neoliberal two-step – fighting for the legalization for same-sex marriage while slashing social spending and extracting significant concessions from the state’s public sector workers – disorienting and demobilizing the state’s progressive forces in the process. Cuomo consistently portrays himself as a reluctant neoliberal forced to pursue a regressive agenda by the state’s chronic fiscal crisis. His mantra is “I’m a progressive Democrat who’s broke,” which may be more accurately rendered as “I’m a craven opportunist who doesn’t want to pick a fight with the financial elite.” That didn’t stop the Working Families Party from endorsing him, a controversial move that likely cost it support from many of its traditional voters.

But a lot has changed over the last few months. Tax receipts from the financial sector are lower than expected, and last month state officials announced that next year’s budget gap will be $3.5 billion instead of $2.4 billion, as originally projected. At the same time, Occupy Wall Street has emboldened progressives whose opposition to Cuomo’s policies hitherto consisted of little more than half-hearted grousing from the sidelines. In the new political and discursive environment, New Yorkers won’t accept another draconian budget while the state’s grotesquely regressive tax system remains unchanged, and Cuomo knows it. Hence his belated embrace of tax reform and stimulus spending.