On September 24, 2011, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna was videotaped dispensing pepper spray into the faces of several women, among them the two plaintiffs, Chelsea Elliott and Jeanne Mansfield. The plaintiffs and other women were trapped inside of a plastic orange net by police, when Deputy Inspector Bologna stepped up and sprayed the women. The assault and battery video was then posted on YouTube, and it immediately went viral.
In a sign of growing desperation about his drooping reputation, lasting legacy, and his close ties with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has launched a Super Bowl commercial, to fluff himself up.
In a post entitle, "Bloomberg cements place as Nanny State King," HotAir.com gives some history to how Mayor Bloomberg has legislated everybody's private life. FYI to everybody : Mayor Bloomberg's regimented "nanny state" wouldn't be possible without help from Speaker Quinn.
Do Protesters Have To Leave A Coffin Outside St. Vincent's Hospital, To Demonstrate How Deadly The Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Really Is ?
The people, who live around the Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Project at St. Vincent's Hospital, will live a life of a nightmare for years : they will be living next to a major construction project that will stir up asbestos, rodents, noise, and other construction-related pollution. And this is not even taking into consideration the fact that the luxury condominiums and townhouses are replacing a full-service hospital, meaning, that there is no no where to go if residents (including the luxury condo buyers) have asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, or trauma. All this courtesy of Seventh Avenue Socialite Amanda Burden and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
In the 21 months since St. Vincent's Hospital has closed, our political leaders have showed no activity to prevent hospital closings in New York City.
A Beth Israel ambulance was stuck in traffic in front
of a closed hospital in the West Village of Manhattan.
Five hospitals in Brooklyn are in danger of closing, according to The New York Times : Interfaith Medical Center, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, and Brooklyn Hospital Center.
In the case of St. Vincent's Hospital, which closed in 2010, leaving a hole in public health in the Lower West Side of Manhattan, activists are seizing on the irresponsible hospital closings as a way to organise for a single-payer healthcare system : "How can we bring a hospital back to our community ? How can we get true universal healthcare ? Come Join the Discussion ! RSVP at the Facebook page for the St. Vincent's Community Assembly."
The Rudin Luxury Condo Conversion Plan for St. Vincent's Hospital was approved on Monday, Jan. 23, 2012, by Amanda Burden, the Amsterdam Avenue socialite, who volunteers in her free time to be City Planner for New York City. Other political enablers have joined Ms. Burden in aiding the Rudin Family's scheme to convert what used to be the only full-service hospital and Level 1 Trauma Center that served the Lower West Side of Manhattan into luxury condominiums and deluxe townhouses.
"Mr. Sheirer was driving to work from his home on Staten Island when he began having chest pains, pulled over at 14th Street and 10th Avenue and called 911. He was taken to Beth Israel Hospital, where he died," reported The New York Times.
Richard J. Sheirer, the former director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management during the September 11th attacks, fell ill a few blocks away from St. Vincent's. Video by Suzannah B. Troy.
Join us on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 6 p.m. at the LGBT Community Center at 208 West 13th Street in the West Village.
With St. Vincent’s closed, the West Side still has no hospital beds below 57th Street. How can we bring a hospital back to our community ? How can we get true universal healthcare ? Come Join the Discussion ! RSVP at the Facebook page for the St. Vincent's Community Assembly.
This "town hall" is a consensus-based conversation facilitated by HEALTHCARE FOR THE 99%, an OCCUPY WALL STREET working group.
Mayor Bloomberg Defends Beyoncé's VIP Treatment at Lenox Hill Hospital Even As Inequality and Injustice in Healthcare Becomes More and More Pronounced in the Aftermath of the Closing of St. Vincent's Hospital.
The power couple and their little bundle of joy, Blue Ivy Carter, have been under fire from angry parents who’ve complained about being blocked from seeing their newborns thanks to airtight security measures for the superstar couple, who reportedly rented out the fourth floor of the hospital for $1.3 million. ...
“If [the hospital] got paid a lot of money and it let them provide services to other people who don’t have insurance or can’t afford it, I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing," he said.
Mayor Bloomberg said during a press conference celebrity or luxury hospital suites can be "an enormous revenue source" at a time when the Mayor keeps cutting the budgets of public city hospitals.
Mayor Bloomberg had more to say about whether celebrities and rich people should get better "services" than lower-class patients. “I don’t think you should keep people from seeing their babies, or whatever, but have different services for people who are full-paying patients," he said. “It’s easy to go and criticize, but somebody’s got to pay.”
Activists from the Healthcare for the 99 Per Cent. Working Group of #OWS gathered in Union Square on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
Advocates for a true universal healthcare system "for all" gathered at Union Square on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, to call attention to what they said was the inequality in the provision of healthcare in New York City, New York State, and in the United States.
Advocates were joined by members of PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program), HC499% (the Healthcare for the 99 Per Cent. Working Group of #OccupyWallStreet), and by St. Vincent's Hospital activists.
In 1966, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and most inhuman."
After Going on a Decade-Long Spree of Hospital Closings, New York City Michael Bloomberg is Launching a New Desperate Campaign Blitz to Resuscitate His Public Image.
Mayor Bloomberg has launched a Facebook advertising propaganda campaign to counter his growing image of a reckless chief public officer of New York City. He likes to tout his anti-smoking campaign, but how about his record on hospital closings ? If the Rudin Family's Luxury Condo Plan is approved for St. Vincent's by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, then 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 Luxury Condo Plan for St. Vincent's Hospital until a full-service hospital is created.
Mic Check : Christmas Caroling in front of St. Vincent's Hospital
Protestors gathered on Christmas Eve in 32 degree weather -- and some spent all night on the frigid sidewalk to symbolize the patients "Left Out In The Cold" after the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital. Activists and community members modified a classic Christmas Carol, "Here Comes Santa Claus" in this YouTube video.
NYDaily News : John Haggerty was sentenced to 1 1/3 to 4 years on each of two counts of supposedly "stealing" money from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After being sentenced, Mr. Haggerty was taken into custody.
The Queens political operative who stole nearly $1 million from Mayor Bloomberg is heading to the slammer.
A judge dismissed pleas for leniency and sentenced John Haggerty to one and a third to four years in state prison.
Probation was not enough, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel said, “in order to restore the public confidence in the electoral process and to serve as a deterent.”
Also, Haggerty will have to return the $900,000 or so he stole from Bloomberg, the judge said.
That means Haggerty will likely have to sell the $1.6 million Forest Hills house he grew up in — and which he ripped off the mayor to buy out his brother’s share. ...
Mayor Bloomberg's shady campaign finance scandal is an outrage, not to mention the fact that Mayor Bloomberg was hiring political operatives to suppress the vote through "thinly-veiled ballot security operations," but, just like the Watergate scandal, only the aids to the executive politician go to jail, not the crooked politician, who gets blanket immunity/pardon.
It's a Wonderful Life : Christmas Caroling for St. Vincent's Hospital
On Christmas Eve night, joins us as we welcome local residents, who are walking from house to house, singing Christmas Carols.
Activists will be standing outside the closed Bailey Savings and Loan -- I mean, the closed St. Vincent's Hospital -- where we will be singing Christmas Carols and handing out band-aids, because band-aids will be all the healthcare you'll get from the new first aid clinic that will replace St. Vincent's.
You see, old man Potter -- I mean, old man Rudin -- has bought the old St. Vincent's for pennies on the dollar, and he now awaits the New York City Council to give final approval for the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's. Some activists will spend the entire evening outside to demonstrate first hand how emergency care patients have been "left out in the cold" by the Rudin luxury condo conversion.
Billion-dollar defense contractor SAIC posted a quarterly loss due to its continuing CityTime fraud scandal. The troubled company wrote down the value of its assets to account for a growing allowance it is pooling to refund New York City taxpayers for the fraudulent over-billing on the failed CityTime payroll project.
UNC-Chapel Hill students launch online petition to overturn University's decision to invite Mayor Michael Bloomberg to serve as the 2012 commencement speaker.
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.
"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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