St. Vincent's Hospital activist bird-dogs billionaire Bill Rudin over controversial luxury condo conversion plan.
Artist and political commentator Suzannah B. Troy confronts Bill Rudin on West 12th Street. Community anger towards Mr. Rudin has inspired many protests, including a sustained protest and vigil outside the sales office of the new luxury condos. Mr. Rudin has ruthlessly ignored the community’s need for a full-service hospital. Mr. Rudin paid pennies on the dollar to buy St. Vincent’s real estate, and Mr. Rudin now stands to sell luxury condos and townhouses that, once constructed, are expected to have a combined fair-market value of over $1 billion.
'' At least since the Republican National Convention of 2004, our police have grown accustomed to forcibly penning, arresting, and sometimes spraying and whacking protesters and reporters. On Monday, The New York Times and 12 other organizations sent a letter of protest to the Police Department. 'The police actions of last week,' the authors said, 'have been more hostile to the press than any other event in recent memory,' '' wrote Mr. Powell.
Health Petition : Mayor Michael Bloomberg : Stop the Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Plan
Sign Our Petition ! The Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Plan will set a dangerous public health precedent. City politicians would be saying that a top 1% real estate developer can make hundreds of millions of dollars in private profit by converting the charitable public real estate buildings of the former St. Vincent's Hospital, whilst the 99% have no replacement Level One Trauma Center or Full-Service Hospital. If Rudin's Condo Plan is approved, Mayor Bloomberg would be saying that it is O.K. for an entire section of New York City to have no full-service hospital. How can this be a responsible public health care policy ? Mayor Bloomberg needs to stop the Rudin Condo Plan for St. Vincent's Hospital until a full-service hospital is created.
No comment from openly lesbian New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to the homophobic comments and attitude by the private security guards employed Brookfield Properties. An unidentified security guard used the pejorative epithet of ''faggot'' against Joey Boots.
Note that at 0:24 appears Deputy Inspector Edward Winski, the chief of the First Precinct of Manhattan. An anonymous source said that many of the private security guards that work for Brookfield Properties are off-duty or retired officers from the NYPD. And because Brookfield Properties hires off-duty and retired police officers, it gives Brookfield the inside line of being able to pick up a cellphone and reach a direct line to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. For his part, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appealed a favourable gay marriage ruling in 2005, because he opposed marriage equality for LGBT New Yorkers.
WE THE PEOPLE, of the city of New York and citizens of America, demand the immediate resignation of current mayor Michael ''Mike'' Bloomberg due to gross negligence in handling of Occupy Wall Street, thousands of protestors have been denied their 1st amendment right. Mayor Bloomberg continually turns a blind eye to the abuse being brought by the NYPD.
Activists Expose that the Association for a Better New York is a front group for billionaire real estate empire.
Activists that support a new hospital to replace St. Vincent's have exposed that William Rudin and his so-called ''civic'' group that operates under the name of the Association for a Better New York only to further the real estate development opportunities for the Rudin Management Company. What do you think ? Please post your comments.
In a separate action, started by LGBT civil rights activist Alan Bounville, the community is being asked to take part in a phone zap against Rudin Management Company. Mr. Bounville is asking that everybody contact John Gilbert, the COO of Rudin Management Group by calling 1-212-407-2400 and by e-mailing : jgilbert@rudin.com
"Please join the masses and flood Rudin Management Company's phone and email this week so they are aware of the growing wave of public disgust with them stealing a hospital from the community!" urged Mr. Bounville.
The economics of the Rudin luxury condo conversion plan for St. Vincent's is proving to be a very lucrative real estate development plan. Rudin paid $260 million for the St. Vincent's campus, and it obtained $525 million in construction financing for the project. If you combine these two figures, then the total cost going into the luxury condo conversion is about $785 million. If Rudin sells the luxury condos and townhouses for a combined value of over $1 billion, then it would be very easy for Rudin to net well over $200 million in profit from the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital.
The lure of profit well in excess of $200 million during this Great Recession may be one reason that Rudin has spent easily over $200,000 on hiring the real estate lobbyist Melanie Meyers and made a bundle of approximately $30,000 in donations to the 2013 mayor campaign of Christine Quinn.
The lure of profit well in excess of $200 million during this Great Recession has also triggered a possible fraud probe. Two months ago, The New York Post reported that the Manhattan District Attorney was investigating whether hospital executives intentionally let St. Vincent’s fail, so that the Rudin could buy the hospital’s real estate on the cheap.
No wonder that William Rudin and City Council Speaker are laughing all the way to the bank, while community members are stuck in crosstown traffic or suffering through long Emergency Room wait times in order to get emergency medical attention.
Who is Robert Fiedler, and what is his connection to SAIC ?
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Manpower vs. Equipment - Defense dollars will get prioritized
www.roa.org/site/DocServer/0905_officer.pdf?docID=15781
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ROBERT FEIDLER • DIRECTOR, ROA strategic defense education ...... SAIC Makes Next. Generation of Maps. Rivada Networks specializes in the ...
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Strategic Reserve Still Required - Reserve Officers Association
www.roa.org/site/DocServer/0902_officer.pdf?docID=12261
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out of ROA's education efforts as Robert Feidler, director of. ROA strategic defense education, and Eric Minton, Officer editor, profile an ROA-hosted forum on ...
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September 2008 - Reserve Officers Association
www.roa.org/site/DocServer/0809_officer.pdf?docID=10061
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Google Issues Apology ; Tries To Explain Away Censorship As ''A Processing Error.''
Following the censorship of the No Third Term blog, which triggered the suspension of all of my blogs, I spread word about the censorship and asked all my friends to write to Google, asking that they restore my blogs and reïnstate my account. Following is a great YouTube video by Suzannah B. Troy :
The suspension of the blogs took place before 5 a.m. this afternoon, and the blogs were fully restored shortly after 1 p.m. this afternoon. Here is Google's apology, with no other explanation :
Hi Louis,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have reviewed the account and determined that the blogs were removed due to a processing error. The blogs have now been reinstated. We are sorry for any inconvenience or misunderstanding this may have caused.
Best,
Rachel
Google press team
Thank you to everybody, who contacted Google, to ask them to restore my blogs. I am very grateful to you.
The requirement for "protest permits" in New York City, which bedevils the #OccupyWallStreet movement, can be traced back to Christine Quinn.
On September 24, 2011, what was then the eighth day of the #OccupyWallStreet protest, about 1,000 protesters went on an unpermitted march from Zuccotti Park to Union Square Park in Manhattan. Along the way, 80 people were arrested for various reasons, according to Gothamist :
The majority of the arrests, which were for disorderly conduct, obstructing governmental administration, blocking vehicular traffic, and one assault on a police officer, occurred around Union Square yesterday afternoon after nearly a thousand demonstrators marched down Broadway. Videos show NYPD officers corralling women with nets, indiscriminately discharging pepper spray, and tackling protestors.
How New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn figures into the arrests of what now numbers well over 1,000 #OccupyWallStreet protesters is a matter of historical record : just take a look at who approved the protest permit requirement in the first place. Not surprisingly, the development of protest permits in New York City can be ascertained by following the course of how Speaker Quinn sold out her liberal roots in pursuit of mayoral electability.
In 2006, multiple courts ruled the City’s assembly rules unconstitutional, and City Council was charged with fixing them. Instead of conducting public hearings and placing the matter into the hands of City Council, Speaker Quinn abdicated her responsibilities and allowed the NYPD to write these rules behind closed doors.
In February 2007, she rubberstamped the new rules into effect. Suddenly, it became illegal for 50 or more people to gather and process through New York City—unless they request and are given prior permission from the police.
Of course, the NYPD has a long history of attacking political groups, and one of their favorite tools is to deny permit requests of groups—like the organizers of the 2007 Trans Day of Action—who they don’t like.
Why do police decide who can assemble and who cannot? And since when do the police write rules? And why is all of this okay with Quinn?
Quinn so desperately wants to be mayor that she has sold the queer community and her constituents down the historical river for her own political gain. We’ll remind Quinn that she has her pot of gold, but she better not forgot the rainbow that led her to it!
A political enabler with aims to minimise, and even silence, dissent.
It should come as no surprise that Speaker Quinn "abdicated her responsibilities." When Speaker Quinn is faced with the dilemma between doing the right thing and picking what renders her with an immediate political advantage, Speaker Quinn always picks what is most politically expedient. Even those, who should be her most ardent base of support, leftist LGBT radical activists, know that Speaker Quinn cannot be counted upon to stay true to her liberal roots.
Speaker Quinn has a reputation for bluffing her way through critical public policy issues, like the hole in public health caused by the impending luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's Hospital. As has been written on this blog before, Speaker Quinn has mastered the art of the non-answer answer : "She likes to be evasive, but she is definitive about giving you the run-around. She doesn’t have to give you either a proverbial bait-and-switch or back-pedal, provided she never has to first give you any policy position with which to lure you."
But Speaker Quinn's evasiveness begins to wear thin amongst radical activists, who know that the only way to make our elected politicians deliver a tangible solution to a societal problem is by keeping them politically accountable. Here is where direct action protest organisers enter into the political equation.
A Gay City News news report, which is no longer available online, was copied on the Radical Homosexual Agenda's website :
On Wednesday night over 500 people filled the City Council chamber for a celebration of "LGBT Pride and the Journey to End Violence and Hate." Among those honored were NYPD Detective Kevin Czartoryski, the Rashawn Brazell Memorial Fund, established in recognition of the brutal 2005 murder of a 19-year-old gay man from Brooklyn, and the Gay-Straight Alliance at Port Richmond High School in Staten Island.
Tony-winning actor Stephen Spinella opened the evening, and Speaker Christine Quinn, the first openly lesbian or gay leader of the Council, flanked in the front row by her partner, Kim Catullo, and her father Lawrence, recalled the city's decades-long struggle to achieve gay rights.
In the midst of her speech, half a dozen protesters from ACT UP and the Radical Homosexual Agenda unfurled protest banners from the balcony. They were criticizing a new police regulation requiring groups of 50 or more to first obtain a police permit. "You've criminalized the Dyke March and the Drag March," Tim Doody (pictured with Nina Resnick) of ACT UP yelled. Quinn allowed the protesters to have their say [for one minute], after which they were escorted from the building. There were no arrests.
Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, the chamber's other out lesbian member, who has been a vocal critic of the regulation, spoke up on Quinn's behalf. "My speaker cannot do anything until the Council is behind her," Mendez told the chamber.
''A Council Speaker Who Tightens the Purse Strings on Dissent''
Back on June 20, 2007, when activists with the Radical Homosexual Agenda were targeting Speaker Quinn over the NYPD's anti-assembly rules, activist James Wagner charged that Speaker Quinn had "made herself inaccessible" to activists, who had been seeking to meet with her about the requirement for protest permits. Mr. Wagner wrote that after the activists had been removed from the City Council Chambers, following their banner drop, Speaker Quinn said that she was "willing to meet with anyone who disagreed with her on the question of Police rules for assembly." But, as Mr. Wagner further wrote, Speaker Quinn's expression of willingness turned out to ring hallow : "For the record, I have been assured several times by those who know groups that have tried to engage her that she has repeatedly refused to do this in the past."
Sometime between the mass NYPD arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention and the 2008 revelation of Speaker Quinn's slush fund scandal, Speaker Quinn decided that the best way to campaign to become mayor of New York City was to hitch her wagon to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's gravy train. But because she does not have Mayor Bloomberg's billions, she was going to use taxpayer money to buy her way into higher office. When even The New York Times, with its many puff and fluff articles about Speaker Quinn's career, dares to report about how Speaker Quinn uses taxpayer money to stifle political dissent, you know that Speaker Quinn has begun to tread on thin political ice.
And now that activists with #OccupyWallStreet are confronting the use of excessive force of, and even brutality by, NYPD, those very activists are going to question Speaker Quinn's role in approving the restrictions on civil liberties caused by her rubber stamp on the NYPD’s anti-assembly rules. And once again, here comes another time when direct action protest organisers enter into the political equation.
"Mr. Bloomberg knows that his reputation has taken hard blows in the fight over term limits. But he is apparently betting that the passage of time will restore whatever he may have lost in respectability." -- Clyde Haberman, The New York Times, October 27, 2008.
"Mr. Bloomberg's popularity is high, but his handling of protesters to the 2004 Republican National Convention, when thousands of demonstrators were swept off the streets and detained, is a black mark on his record for many New Yorkers and civil libertarians." -- The New York Times
"For more than a year before the convention, the Police Department monitored Web sites and sent undercover detectives around the nation to collect information on Bush opponents planning to demonstrate in New York. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the operation helped keep order. " The New York Times, April 3, 2007
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