No Third Term : Th3 ill-fat3d, karmically-doom3d th3rd t3rm of Micha3l Bloomb3rg
Is Christine Quinn going to hold the NYPD accountable for raiding the Eagle on the very night when marriage equality became law ? What kind of an LGBT leader is she, if she does not fight for our LGBT civil rights ? Join our Facebook page : Gays Against Christine Quinn.
Christine Quinn Uses City Council Funds (aka Taxpayer Money) to Reward Political Bosses
After City Council Speaker Christine Quinn got fluffed by NYTimes reporter David W. Chen, now comes Michael Powell, a columnist for the Gray Lady, who pulls back the curtain on Speaker Quinn's slush fund-tinged campaign for mayor.
Mr. Powell reports that Ms. Quinn was appointed Speaker of the City Council after she "charmed" political bosses from Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. At her coronation ceremony, she put Vito Lopez, the notorious Brooklyn political boss (who is the target of several ethical and corruption investigations) in the front row. Speaker Quinn has also scratched Mr. Vito's back in exchange for his political support. "The fates have smiled on Mr. Lopez’s social-service empire, the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council ; this year the Council sent more than $4 million its way," reported the NYTimes.
In a statement posted Facebook, a government integrity watchdog activist questioned why the latest NYTimes article stops short of probing the status of the federal investigation into Speaker Quinn's slush fund scandal.
"Instead of reporting on Quinn's criminal activity, the NY Times merely raises questions about her ethics and leadership: "But there are questions to be asked about her leadership, and not all cheery." Is it a fear of Bloomberg that prevents the Times from reporting on the well-documented budget and campaign corruption ?" Donny Moss posted on the social network.
This is how the NYTimes article ends :
Last year, a Council majority favored mandatory sick days for New Yorkers with less than a week of vacation. The mayor opposed it. Ms. Quinn killed it.
Some suggest that she has gotten lost in the game, that she can no longer recall the questions she once asked as an advocate. That sounds too definitive. Her arc is not done.
She affects nonchalance when described as a mayoral puppet: “You can call me Mini-Me. I don’t really care.”
The rub is that voters might care a lot.
Manhattan District Attorney is investigating St. Vincent's ''go-for-broke plan'' that has supposedly enriched the Rudin Managedment Company, which has been waiting in the wings for the hospital to flatline.
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St. Vincent's Hospital is under investigation by the Manhattan DA's office for allegations that the Rudin Management Company has been planning a real estate harvesting/luxury condo conversion plan of the shuttered hospital.
St. Vincent's closed on April 30, 2010, after it laid off many of its employees. Many employees later learned that the hospital was not paying into the state's unemployment fund, so those who were laid off were not eligible for unemployment benefits.
Ever since it closed, the impacted community of the Lower West Side of Manhattan has been calling for investigations into what lead to the hospital's sudden closure. The hospital failed to file a closure plan, as it was required to do, with the New York State Department of Health.
From an article in The New York Post :
Going broke allowed the hospital to get an OK from the state Health Department to sell to the Rudin family, which is building luxury housing on the site. Without bankruptcy, state officials would not have been permitted the hospital to shut down, the sources said.
"This was a well-thought-out plan," said Tom Shanahan, a lawyer for a group of former St. Vincent doctors and nurses suing St. Vincent's. "They wanted out and had to justify it to the state. They were running it into the ground."
DA Cy Vance's team is looking into whether vendors double-billed for services, gave kickbacks for contracts and hired relatives of hospital employees, sources said.
Seeing as how we live under a weekly threat that he is going to close down firehouses, layoff teachers, flush more taxpayer money down the toilet with the CityTime project, and look the other way as the MTA and PATH jack up our fares, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's popularity has hit record lows. Isn't it about time that New York City voters opened their eyes ? Will they do the same about Christine Quinn ?
To find out how real journalists assess City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's record, one needs to look no further than the sensibility expressed in this blog post on True News From Change : NYT Sets the Definition on How To Judge and Pick the Next Mayor and It Fits Quinn
In his blog post, the journalist Gary Tilzer makes many astute observations about David W. Chen's infomercial fluff piece about Speaker Quinn, and perhaps this is the most sharpest of Mr. Tilzer's criticisms : ''It was the publisher of the NYT, along with the NYP and Daily News, that used their papers to support changing the term limits law to allow Bloomberg and Quinn to run for a third term. Mr. Chen does not challenge Quinn when she brushes off her term limits and other critics as 'naïve' ideologues.''
It's already been documented how Christine Quinn bluffs her way through important social issues.
What Speaker Quinn is doing by making her ''unapologetic'' ''move to the middle'' is selling out the working class families of New York City. Her policies favour real estate developers -- and come to the detriment, suffering, and mass displacement of working class New Yorkers. Speaker Quinn's vision of New York City is a continuation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's vision : more glass and steel luxury condos and less hospitals, firehouses, public schools, and senior centers. Speaker Quinn wants to make life so unbearable to the average wage-earning New Yorker that we all pick up and leave town.
How do we know that Christine Quinn has sold out her values and beliefs and still find herself to be in a place of denial about it, so much so that she accuses her critics of being “naïve” ideologues ?
Speaker Quinn's ideas about leadership in New York, by supporting the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's Hospital, which used to be the only full-service hospital with a Level 1 Trauma Center below 14th Street, is like GLAAD publicly supporting the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger. Not only would AT&T be in an even stronger position to undo net neutrality, but what is GLAAD doing by meddling in a telecom merger approval process with the FCC ? Likewise, why is a ''supposedly!! celebrated LGBT third-term politician like Christine Quinn rushing toward the ''middle'' of the political spectrum, if it means that she has to abandon her idealistic beginnings and instead now oppose paid sick leave and a living wage bill ?
"AT&T was one of the companies whose local representatives sits on the board of directors of the Tennessee chamber of commerce," wrote John Aravosis at Americablog. "You remember them, the group that endorsed and actively lobbied for the measure repealing gay and trans rights ordinances in the state, mandating it so that no trans person can ever change their birth certificate gender in the future, and banning any future civil rights ordinances for anyone in the future. That AT&T."
What does the intersection of St. Vincent's Hospital/Rudin Family Luxury Condo Conversion and the GLAAD/AT&T T-Mobile mega deals have to do with Christine Quinn and New York City politics ?
In each case, you see the erosion of core values of fighting for an activist's central reason for being : serving their constituency. But once you get to be so big, you can blow off you constituency as “naïve” ideologues (or drop the F-bomb on them, the way that one of her administrative assistants did).
If, throughout our nation's history, our goal has been to distribute power and authority equally among voters, then the voters, who have less choices on election day, get their voices muffled. Who is going to challenge GLAAD to focus once again on its original intention ? Who is going to put pressure on Christine Quinn to deliver on the community’s demands to stop all the hospital closings that are happening across New York City ?
It is not too much to expect that the people, who you elect to City Council, start to deliver something tangible for New York City voters.
Speak now, or forever hold your peace.
Christine Quinn - Plaza Hotel - Gays Against Quinn (Protest Video)
Over 20 activists gathered outside the Plaza Hotel in a demonstration against City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Watch as protesters speak against Christine Quinn to former Mayor David Dinkins' entourage and hand anti-Quinn literature to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
One of the Speaker Quinn's fellow guests was patronising to protesters, and did you notice how a homeless man was collecting aluminum cans on the red carpet of the Plaza Hotel, while Speaker Quinn dined inside the Plaza Hotel ?
Some of us were there because of Speaker Quinn's use of a $50 million slush fund during a time when we live under constant threat by Mayor Bloomberg, that he is going to lay off teachers and close down fire houses. Others were there, because Speaker Quinn pushed through a controversial extension of term limits, allowing Mayor Bloomberg, herself, and others, to run for a third term in office. Still yet others were there because of Speaker Quinn's complete abdication of full civil rights for LGBT New Yorkers, do-nothing record over hospital closings, horrible animal rights record, and use of city staff for campaign work.
Please join us for a Third Anniversary Protest of the Term Limits Extension at 2 pm on Sunday, October 23, at City Hall.
Please also join our Facebook group : Gays Against Christine Quinn.
Peninsula Hospital Center - Protesters Take Over Lobby - Hospital Closings in NYC
Approximately 200 union employees, residents of Far Rockaway, in Queens, and local officials, gathered in the rain outside Peninsula Hospital Center, across the bay from JFK Airport. Peninsula Hospital Center has filed a plan to shut its doors. The hospital’s owner is embroiled in a political and financial scandal, but employees and residents are worried about the threat to public health, should the hospital’s closure plan be approved.
Attendees of the rally braved the rain, then, once the rally had ended, stormed into one of the lobbies of the hospital, until hospital officials called the police, to clear the lobby of its own employees.
In the time that Christine Quinn had been speaker of the City Council, eight hospitals (not counting Peninsula) have closed. If Peninsula closes, it would mark the ninth hospital to close under Speaker Quinn's watch.
This week, President Obama agreed to severe budget cuts to social safety net programs, that underpin the social contract we make with our government and amongst ourselves. More budget cuts to Medicaid and Medicare will lead to a further collapse of our healthcare system. Is Christine Quinn in Bermuda with Mayor Michael Bloomberg each time a hospital closes in New York City ? Is President Obama surfing in Hawaii each time a hospital closes in America ?
If we obediently listen to people, who are in power (the same people who work for us, the very same people who are closing our hospitals), telling us to leave the lobby of a closing hospital, then it just makes it that much easier for the New York State Department of Health/Christine Quinn to keep closing hospitals.
Is the Rudin Family eyeing their next real estate harvesting operation on the dead carcass of the Peninsula Hospital Center in Queens ?
After he's done with St. Vincent's Hospital, it has been heard on the street that William Rudin is considering another real estate harvesting operation, this time at the Peninsula Hospital Center in Queens.
LO AND BEHOLD ! Joel Klein awarded a no-bid $27 million Department of Education contact in apparent conflict of interest.
News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch, through a subsidiary controlled by former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, has snatched a $27 million New York State Department of Education contract without a public bidding process, The New York Daily News has reported.
No surprise, but The Daily News also reported that the Murdoch subsidiary, known as Wireless Generation, paid as much as $5,000 a month to the lobbying firm Public Strategies, Inc., to gain "agency support" for a no-bid contract, The Daily News reported.
Playing dumb, the spokesman for the State Department of Education, Tom Dunn, said that he was not aware of any "lobbying."
Late last year, Murdoch's News Corp. decided to go after a bigger slice of corrupt government tech deals by agreeing to buy data firm Wireless Generation for $360 million in cash, The New York Post reported in November 2010.
Wireless Generation builds large-scale, out-of-control data systems that nominally "help educators and parents keep track of student progress," but which News Corp. hopes will help it fluff its profits.