Showing posts with label NYSNA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYSNA. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Did de Blasio's endorsement, and lingering anger over LICH closure, cost Peter Sikora the election ?

Press won't even mention voter anger over closure of Long Island College Hospital as factor in rejection of de Blasio endorsement, Sikora loss

Overlooked in the aftermath of yesterday’s Democratic Party primary elections across New York state is the loss of candidate Peter Sikora in the 52nd Assembly District in Brooklyn. Mr. Sikora, who benefitted from the endorsements of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Working Families Party, and the New York State Nurses Association, lost the election to Jo Anne Simon.

In trying to justify Mr. Sikora’s loss, the media has proposed all number of excuses, ranging from the fact that Mayor de Blasio’s endorsement didn’t amount to much, because he made so many, diluting any impact that they might have ordinarily had, to the fact that the machine candidate, Ms. Simon, had more institutional support.

Unacknowledged is the lingering and growing voter anger over the closure of Long Island College Hospital. In the 52nd Assembly District in Brooklyn, which encompasses the catchment area formerly served by LICH, the voter anger against Mayor de Blasio’s betrayal of his central campaign promise to stop anymore hospital closings rubbed off on Mr. Sikora, even though he had the NYSNA endorsement, meaning that Brooklyn voters were able to see through the mayor’s politically-expedient machinations, as well as Mr. Sikora’s.

RELATED


In Hotly Contested Races, the de Blasio Endorsement Only Goes So Far (The New York Observer)

Peter Sikora running away from failed LICH promises, de Blasio exploitation cover-up (NYC : News & Analysis)

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Turning their backs on LICH, de Blasio and Cuomo stir up community and activist anger

Mayor de Blasio has gone back on his campaign promise to support "hospitals, not condos." And the governor, well, Gov. Cuomo has been trying to close Brooklyn hospitals from Day One.

Mayor de Blasio's staff encouraged community groups to accept the luxury condo conversion of LICH photo de_Blasio_LICH_MFrost_10-28-13_500layoffs_C_0_zps36c823e0.jpg

RELATED


LICH closure causing growing political backlash in Brooklyn ; Mayor, Governor under pressure (The Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Healthcare As Bargaining Chips in New York City Politics // The Pelican Brief (NYC : News & Analysis)

Disappointment in Mayor Bill de Blasio is turning into community outrage as residents of Brooklyn come to grips with how the mayor's office waged a duplicitous campaign in regards to Long Island College Hospital, or LICH as it is better known.

Publicly, Mayor de Blasio was giving lip service to saving LICH, but privately, some community activists are now saying that the mayor's staff was trying to bully healthcare activists into supporting the closure of the hospital so that a large real estate developer could convert the complex medical campus into luxury condos.

The reality of the mayor's duplicitious nature, while shocking to grassroots activists, comes as no surprise to astute political observers of how the real corrupt nature of the broken political system works in New York City. Mayor de Blasio stormed into office during last year's mayoral election with the aid of a corrupt Super PAC undercuting his chief rival and with promises to provide a clean break from the Bloomberg-Quinn administration. The mayor's empty and meaningless campaign promises weren't made, because he believed in them, but because his campaign consultants knew that the electorate was desperate for change, and that this messaging would help him win the election -- a prediction that turned out to be correct, but that would not fix the broken political system, because that was never the de Blasio campaign's intention.

The latest revelation of the mayor's duplicitous administration comes from an article about LICH in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle :

Following SUNY’s announcement on Friday that it had reached an “agreement in principle” to sell the LICH campus in Cobble Hill to Fortis for development into condos, local officials representing the LICH catchment area issued a statement putting them on the opposite side of the fence with the Mayor, who pushed for the deal.

While campaigning on the theme of "hospitals, not condos," De Blasio has apparently moderated his stance since becoming Mayor, saying that an urgent care center and "stand-alone ER" planned for the site will preserve health care for northwestern Brooklyn. Sources told the Brooklyn Eagle that in February the Mayor's staff put pressure on the community groups fighting for LICH to support Fortis.

The growing political scandal over Mayor de Blasio's betrayal of his campaign promise to save LICH is just the latest example of how the economic realities will fracture Democratic unity : On the city level, nobody knows how the mayor will pay for expansion of pre-kinder, making good on union backpay demands, and fighting income inequality. On the state level, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will use pension IOU vouchers and hospital closings to pay for the $2 billion election year tax cut gimmicks needed to fluff his troubled re-election campaign. Caught in between are healthcare and other social needs reform activists, who are looking to the twin Democratic politicians of New York, asking, "Where's the liberal leadership we can count on ?"

But this fracturing of Democratic unity is only coming about because of how Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo have deceived voters into believing that the Democratic political elite can deliver an overhaul of the broken political system that never answers the demands made by communitys. The elite Democratic politicians will never deliver social, economic, or legal reforms when they are as beholdened to real estate developers as are Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo.

One of Gov. Cuomo's first acts in office was to empanel a controversial Medicaid Redesign Team that has instituted a scorched earth campaign of austerity cuts to the poorest New Yorkers, those who rely on Medicaid for their healthcare. Part of the governor's austerity cuts was to push for the closure of full service hospitals, where the poor and the uninsured seek life-saving, but expensive, healthcare services. His controversial push for more hospital closings came on the heels of the controversial closure of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, which is being now redeveloped into a $1 billion luxury condo and townhouse complex by the billionaire Rudin family. Because of income and wealth disparities, many of the state's poor people are concentrated in New York City, making it an easy target to close hospitals with a charity mission serving the poor and the uninsured. The governor's plan to cut healthcare costs to the poor was expanded under Obamacare, as more and more poor people qualified for Medicaid, a move that forced Gov. Cuomo to close even more charity hospitals. To augment hospital closings, the Obamacare expansion of the New York State Medicaid program makes it difficult for poor people to receive prescriptions for life-saving, but expensive, prescription medications, like cholesterol-fighting medications and other prescription medications for people with long-term diseases or disorders, like irritable bowel syndrome or other functional gastro-intestinal disorders. Against this backdrop of austerity cuts, the closure of LICH on Mayor de Blasio's and Gov. Cuomo's joint watch is opening the eyes of healthcare activists to the unseemly political reality that Demcoratic politicians, even those that self-annoint themselves as "progressives," are just as neoliberal in their need to make austerity cuts to the poor and to the sick as the former center-right administration of Michael Bloomberg and former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Furthermore, if Mayor Bill de Blasio was uncommitted to saving LICH from the start, in spite of his campaign demands for a moratorium on hospital closings, then this doesn't bode well for Interfaith Medical Center, also in Brooklyn, which has been targeted for closure, as well, by Medicaid Redesign Team hatchetman Stephen Berger and Gov. Cuomo.

Even as the 1199 healthcare union protests the job losses and healthcare cuts by corporate-minded CEO's, note that 1199 strong-armed the Working Families Party to endorse the re-election campaign of Gov. Cuomo, whose very own Medicaid Redesign Team implimented large-scale healthcare cuts, including the outsourcing to Mr. Berger the effort to keep closing city hospitals that have resulted in still yet further healthcare union job losses, not including the negative impact to public health.

How long will it take healthcare activists and other grassroots advocates fighting for unfinished healthcare reforms, such as the adoption of a single-payer healthcare system in New York state to replace Obamacare, before they wake up to see how the corrupt political operatives of some healthcare unions, drunk on the corrupt political Kool-Aid of "business as usual," keep neoliberal Democratic politicians in office, who have no intentions of ever delivering the healthcare reforms that the community demands ?

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

BREAKING : Bill de Blasio Was Arrested in an Act of Civil Disobedience to Save LICH

SUNY officials order police to arrest activists trying to save LICH from closure.

New York City public advocate Bill de Blasio was led away in handcuffs after reports that a peaceful demonstration to save Long Island College Hospital from closing turned into an act of civil disobedience.

A demonstration had been scheduled Wednesday morning to apply political pressure on SUNY management officials. SUNY will decide whether LICH remains open or is closed as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's radical healthcare cuts to window dress the New York State budget in advance of his expected bid for the 2016 presidential race.

Healthcare activists, hospital employees, and healthcare union officials have been trying for months to appeal for help from politicians from Albany to City Hall, but the state legislative session ended last month with no rescue package, and locally Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn concluded next years budget negotiations without making any provision to save LICH from closure.

In the last few weeks, activists had been holding many demonstrations, rallies, and other acts of protest to draw attention to the plight of Brooklyn hospitals. Since 2006, ten New York City hospitals have either closed or downsized, and the remaining hospitals are over-burnded. Wait times at emergency rooms are escalating, and patients in life-or-death situations are having to take longer and longer ambulance rides to get to the next nearest emergency room. To make matters worse, Gov. Cuomo empaneled a group called the Medicaid Redesign Team to identify three more hospitals to close in Brooklyn.

On Feb. 8, 2011, four community activists were arrested in an act of civil disobedience to save St. Vincent's Hospital, but the community received no support from Speaker Quinn. At a rally outside of Gov. Cuomo's office on Monday, Mr. de Blasio accused Mayor Bloomberg of just walking away from the community after St. Vincent's Hospital closed. St. Vincent's activists don't remember Mr. de Blasio being involved in the herculean effort to first save St. Vincent's and then to later preserve the hospital infrastructure for a replacement hospital. But pressure politics from this year's mayoral campaign season has finally pushed him to take bold action. Many St. Vincent's activists noted that it was about time that Mr. de Blasio took action, after all, he is the city's Public Advocate.

Speaker Quinn accepted $30,000 in campaign donations from Rudin Management Company before she approved the billion-dollar Rudin condo conversion plan for St. Vincent's Hospital.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Brooklyn Community Wins Major Victory As SUNY Downstate Withdraws LICH Closure Plan

So, the minute that activists started running campaign TV commercials about hospital closings, all of a sudden politicians actually start saving hospitals ?

Hmmmmmmm ... ?

Friday, February 1, 2013

Rally to Save Interfaith and LICH outside Cuomo's Office

Call Gov. Andrew Cuomo : (212) 681-4580. Tell him : Save our hospitals !

Rally on 31 Jan 2013 to save Interfaith Hospital and Long Island College Hospital (LICH) in Brooklyn.

Gov. Cuomo and his political aide, the investment banker monster Stephen Berger, are obsessed with closing hospitals. And now, they are setting up "for profit" hospitals in Brooklyn. This is dangerous !!

Gov. Cuomo, in a supreme act of failed neoliberalism policies, has proposed to make Brooklyn one of two counties in the state as a pilot project, in which current state regulations would be to waived to allow for-profit health care investments. (Read more : Judy Wessler).