Cuomo “first governor we haven’t gotten into a fight with in a long time,” said Kevin Finnegan. http://t.co/XsqYPbIMaw @1199SEIU #saveLICH
— Louis Flores (@maslowsneeds) September 2, 2014The corrupt political mercenaries running unions lead rank and file astray. 1199's Finnegan is Cuomo's lackey. @HammerDaily
— Louis Flores (@maslowsneeds) September 2, 2014
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's summer vacation to Italy has triggered an avalanche of skepticism and resentment from the media and from New Yorkers sympathetic with each of LIRR union workers and commuters, who ride the LIRR. If the pace of the disappointment keeps up on social media, the mayor's advisors may force him to postpone or to even cancel his Italian vacation.
De Blasio demurs on LIRR strike impact on Italy trip http://t.co/Xtt9Cvld6F via @capitalnewyork
— Dana Rubinstein (@danarubinstein) July 14, 2014De Blasio says he won't cut his vacation short in the event of an LIRR strike http://t.co/Q6077dYhu1
— Newsday (@Newsday) July 14, 2014.@BilldeBlasio would not commit to cutting short his vacation if @LIRR workers strike, @SallyGold reports http://t.co/epdhtRVELd
— Capital New York (@capitalnewyork) July 14, 2014Bill de Blasio Won’t Commit to Cutting Italy Trip Short if There’s an LIRR Strike http://t.co/GMNROzY3vt
— Politicker (@Politicker) July 14, 2014De Blasio: LIRR strike may not derail my European vacation http://t.co/hBodIRDX79
— Joel Siegel (@joelmsiegel) July 14, 2014De Blasio not ruling out Italy trip during possible LIRR strike http://t.co/73ABHvvOL2
— WSJ Greater New York (@WSJNY) July 14, 2014... And de Blasio says it's unlikely he'll change plans to go on vacation even if the LIRR strikes http://t.co/FPrh99cP13
— amNewYork (@amNewYork) July 14, 2014Mayor De Blasio Keeps Vacation Plans As Possible LIRR Strike Looms
- http://t.co/U9Kk9wURPY
— David Schantz (@DavidSchantz) July 14, 2014De Blasio won't say if LIRR strike would impact his Italy vacation http://t.co/wlzL4njGNU via @capitalnewyork @SallyGold
— Dan Goldberg (@DanGoldbergCNY) July 14, 2014"It's a technicality." —Bill de Blasio on a provision in the City Charter http://t.co/xLdP5rDP1h
— Conor Skelding (@conorskelding) July 14, 2014Will it really? http://t.co/MkoGkiudRt
— Courtney Williams (@CourtFWilliams) July 15, 2014Gov. Cuomo defends shady, closed-door budget negotiations
Gov. Andrew Cuomo defended his closed-door budget negotiations, saying, “Just because something is done behind closed doors, doesn’t mean the process isn’t transparent,” the Politics On The Hudson blog is reporting, adding, “You can’t do everything in the public view always and have frank, candid meaningful conversations.”
In further remarks, Gov. Cuomo called past attempts at budget transparency, "silly theater."
Wow. @NYGovCuomo bullies @RobAstorino w/ FOIL, but Gov. 1% keeps budget negotiations behind closed doors. http://t.co/meTQR6f5Ne @eorden
— Informed Voting (@informedvoting) March 18, 2014Many politicians, once elected, cease acting on behalf of voters and, instead, become captured by big business interests. Gov. Cuomo has apparently crossed over to the "dark side." Within days of his inauguration in 2010, Gov. Cuomo proposed radical cuts to Medicaid that would lead to a further push to close a series of hospitals in a scorched earth approach to make healthcare cuts to the poor. Now, he's being accused of making tax cuts to benefit the wealthy, aggravating income and wealth inequalities in New York state. That the neoliberal governor is now trying to obfuscate the state's budget negotiations comes as no surprise. Gov. Cuomo is trying to control political blowback to his shady neoliberal machinations.
Mayor de Blasio has outsourced opaque negotiations of city labor contracts to an unpaid advisor, who is not accountable to voters
Further enshrouding government budgets behind a cloak of secrecy, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed the political insider Stanley Brezenoff to be the city's "special unpaid adviser on 152 municipal labor contracts," The New York Daily News reported, noting that Mr. Brezenoff's choice was a "poor" one, given Mr. Brezenoff's history of driving Long Island College Hospital into bankruptcy.
When elected officials want to hide the government functions, they usually hide the business of government behind closed doors or special appointments.
United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew told The New York Daily News that he had "promised Mayor de Blasio not to negotiate in public," according to the news report. When Mayor de Blasio was later confronted by the media about his decision to set aside budget reserves in preparation for the costly city union labor negotiations, Mayor de Blasio refused to answer questions about cost savings, telling Politicker, "I’m not going to answer any specific question," Mr. de Blasio said, in part.
On one hand, you have a governor hiding the business of negotiating the state's $90 billion budget behind closed doors, and, on the other, you have the mayor, refusing to discuss details about the negotiation of what is being estimated to be $7 billion in union contracts, and that is just in back bay demands.
What happened to the Democratic Party's commitment to progressive values, like transparency ?
Attacking or "controlling" bloggers as a way to thwart scrutiny
To further thwart government transparency, the governor and mayor have been taken alternate approaches with respect to bloggers. Over the week-end, Gov. Cuomo discredited bloggers, who are not subject to corporate-controlled editors, for their critical observations of government and elected officials. For his part, Mayor de Blasio has tried to control parent bloggers, forcing them to reprint his political point-of-view in his campaign for universal pre-kinder.
It is only through a full debate of ideas that all sides can come to an appreciation for one another, an informed participation by voters, and the hope of an agreement on issues.
From True News From Change NYC :
Pay to Report Local TV News Control. Spending on advertising has fueled the increase in TV lobbying costs. Well-funded special interests funnel millions to lobbyists for public campaigns to sway lawmakers on hot-button issues. (TU) Local News which is mainly weather, traffic, cooking and dog segments is making millions in lobbyists spending. Union and business interest like the pro fracking interest are also spending millions on ads to local stations. All this money is coming in as local news dumbs down.
Pols and Interests Groups Use Local News By Pushing Their Paid Ads To Win Support For Their Issues
News Brainwashing. The only real news on dumb down local TV are in the paid ads which are not news but bias views of the pol or interests group who paid for the ads to gain public support. Local TV stations stand to profit from boom in super-PAC spending (The Hill) * CSNY’s budget blitz: $3.9 million (updated) (TU) * Save NY airing tax cap ad (TU) * Budget opponents up their ads and mailers (TU) * Bloomberg Blames Negative Ads For Poor Showing In Education (Politico) * Save NY now airs ad on school money (TU) * NYC's Bloomberg Pays for TV Ads Backing Cuomo's Pension (Bloomberg News) * Bloomberg Defends His Administration With TV Ad (NY1) * Local TV News For $ale: How Special Interests Control News Content and Public Opinion (True News)
What Has Happen to the Watchdog Groups of Government or Politics ? An explosion of online news sources in recent years has not produced a corresponding increase in reporting, particularly quality local reporting, a federal study of the media has found.Coverage of state governments and municipalities has receded at such an alarming pace that it has left government with more power than ever to set the agenda and have assertions unchallenged, concluded the study. “In many communities, we now face a shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting,” said the study, which was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission and written by Steven Waldman, a former journalist for Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. “The independent watchdog function that the Founding Fathers envisioned for journalism — going so far as to call it crucial to a healthy democracy — is in some cases at risk at the local level.
Because newspapers have always served as tip sheets for local television reporters and for reporters on the national level, newspapers cutbacks because of the loss of readership to the Internet have had “ripple effects throughout the whole media system." With fewer reporters available to tackle in-depth topics, news releases from politicians and policy makers end up having more influence in some cases, he said, contributing to a kind of power shift toward institutions and away from citizens. * Local News : The Dumbing Down of Journalism (True News)
The King And Quinn : "Shall We Dance ?"
At the conclusion of each and every year's budget negotiation, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn shakes Mayor Michael Bloomberg's hand and kisses him on both cheeks (on his face) in a City Hall ceremony that is much more about their close working relationship than merely reaching an accord on the city's $70 billion budget. Political games with severe consequences are played by Mayor Bloomberg after he announces proposed cuts to city programs, only to give Speaker Quinn the opportunity to portray herself as a champion of the people by restoring those cuts.
According to a WCBS report, the annual "budget dance" leads to serious instability in critical social programs :
"Advocates from the Campaign for Children were particularly pleased with the deal on preserving child care services, particularly since Bloomberg’s earlier budget proposal had called for cuts to 47,000 slots from the child care and after-school systems. But the organization said the city needs to quit threatening to put child care on the chopping block. But the cuts to day care and after school programs are not off the table permanently. They have only been averted for a year.
"Stephanie Gendell of the Citizen’s Committee for Children said the city has engaged in a budget dance where the city threatens nightmare scenarios then saves the day. She said the status quo seem like a victory, when it’s only temporary.
" 'It creates real instability for the programs, and the families to not know if the programs will be open next June,' she said."
When Speaker Quinn says that she uses her close working relationship with Mayor Bloomberg to the betterment of all New Yorkers, she misrepresents the danger that the budget games she's engaged in have on city agencies and on community groups. Is she taking into account how the annual budget dance leaves critical safety net programs at perpetual risk of being unable to adequately plan their future budgets ?
Read more : "City Budget Agreement: Some Expanded Services, No Tax Hikes"
Middle class families should not be forced to scrape by with less while oil companies get away with more.
Lenox Hill Hospital ended its paramedic service to the #UES and turned in its licenses. @micahkellner @billdeblasio
— Sarah Steiner (@Sarahgoat) January 14, 2013
All of a sudden now, the NYPD are worried about their "public relations." They are worried enough to pay thousands of dollars for advertisements, but not worried enough to change the policies, which give them the bad reputation that they have.
Our demand is that the City Council defund the NYPD of the resources that allows police to carry on their unconstitutional and discriminatory policy of using "stop-and-frisk" unfairly and illegally towards minority communities.
Join us on Sunday at 1 pm in Jackson Heights for a protest against one of the chief political enablers of the "stop-and-frisk" policy : March Against Christine Quinn and Stop-And-Frisk.
Each and every year, @chriscquinn approves the #NYPD budget without defunding #stopandfrisk facebook.com/events/2573144… @endstopfrisknow
— Stop Christine Quinn (@stopchrisquinn) December 24, 2012
Since she became Speaker of City Council, over 3.7 million New Yorkers have been stopped and frisked. Why is this acceptable ?
This is a sign of leadership failure.
Join us as we march and make the demand that City Council defund the NYPD of the resources so that the police can no longer continue their unconstitutional practice of stopping and frisking mostly innocent people of color.
Bring whistles. We will meet at 74th Street and Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights, Queens. We will then march along Roosevelt Ave. -- and blow our whistles on stop-and-frisk !
Speaker Quinn seems to play a budget game with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which follows tactics that scare people into thinking that the mayor will cut the NYPD budget. But it is all a game to score political points with voters, and it has nothing to do with real public safety or protection of our civil liberties and civil rights.
Desde que se hizo la presidenta del Concejo Municipal, más de 3,7 millones de neoyorquinos se han pasado por el programa de policÃa de "parar y revisar." ¿Por qué es esto aceptable?
Únase a nosotros para marchar y exigir que el Concejo Municipal reduce los recursos proporcionados a la policÃa de Nueva York que permite a la policÃa para continuar con su práctica inconstitucional de "parar y revisar" a personas inocentes.
Traiga pitos. Nos reuniremos en la calle 74 y la Avenida Roosevelt. Entonces, nos marcharemos a lo largo de la avenida Roosevelt. Y soplamos nuestros pitos contra la programa de "parar y revisar."
It's untruthful for both President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney to be running away from having some responsibility in the horrible federal budget deficits.
President Obama signed an extension of the Bush era tax cuts, and the GOP rigged it to be that way.
Austerity is in our future, because both the Democrats and Republicans in Washington are afraid to raise taxes on the 1%. And nobody gets pressed on the Robin Hood tax.
Instead, watch the livestream by Democracy Now. Democracy Now is expanding the debates and letting alternative candidates (like Jill Stein) participate in the presidential debates in real time.
During the course of many years, New York politicians have gone along with a radical plan to close safety net hospitals in a scorched campaign against spiraling healthcare costs. Hospitals with charity missions, like St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village flat-lined as a way to cut off hospitals that served the uninsured, underinsured, and Medicaid-insured.
Related : St. Vincent's Hospital closing was a 'significant disaster,' says Bellevue chief (NYDailyNews
Now comes New York Andrew Cuomo, with news that his austerity program to slash Medicaid will yield a $10 billion bonanza from the federal government, but none of that money, nor any effort to reform any other parts of the state budget, were made to save the many hospitals that have been closed by NYS Department of Health officials : nine hospital have closed in New York City alone during the time that Christine Quinn has been speaker of the City Council.
Media outlets, that promote Gov. Cuomo's neo-liberal agenda, praise the governor's budget cuts and hospital closings, even though Gov. Cuomo delegating all the draconian work to Stephen Berger, who, together with the governor, are shredding the safety net and gutting the very programs that help people with the least.
Mitt Romney's newly announce vice presidential running mate, Paul Ryan, has announced his support for severe cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, along with other controversial policies.
At a community meeting, Mr. Ryan was speaking about Medicare cuts when a senior citizen rose out of his chair and spoke in protest. Tom Nielsen was then promptly grabbed by police and security, and Mr. Nielsen was dragged to another room, where he was shoved to the ground and handcuffed. Meanwhile, Mr. Ryan was making unbelievable jokes about the poor senior citizen, who paid into Medicare his whole life, and only whats given to him what he paid for and what the government promised him now he has reached 71 and is in his old age years.
NYTimes Obituary : Hugh Carey, Who Led Fiscal Rescue of New York City, Is Dead at 92
From The New York Times :
Hugh L. Carey, the governor who helped rescue New York from the brink of financial collapse in the 1970s and tamed a culture of ever-growing spending, died Sunday at his summer home on Shelter Island. He was 92.
His death was announced by the office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
“Governor Carey led our state during a time of great financial turmoil and pulled us back from the brink of bankruptcy and economic ruin,” Mr. Cuomo said in the statement.
As the 51st governor of New York from 1975 through 1982, Mr. Carey led a small group of public servants who vanquished the fiscal crisis that threatened New York City and the state — the direst emergency a governor had faced since the Depression — by taking on powers over the city’s finances that no governor had wielded before and none has wielded since. A liberal Democrat, Mr. Carey reversed the upward spiral of borrowing, spending and entitlement under his predecessor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican who had presided in an era of limitless government promise. ....
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.
Rudin Interview on New York Real Estate Harvesting From Bankrupt Hospitals.
William Rudin, chief executive officer at Rudin Management Co., talks about New York City's real estate and the outlook for commercial property, including the millions the family stands to make from the carcass picking of the real estate property of St. Vincent's Hospital. Watch at 5:40.
To add insult to injury, naturally this interview was broadcast on Bloomberg Opinion, in keeping with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's worldview of starving the beast until it dies in the back of an ambulance, stuck in crosstown traffic.
NYC's Emergency Telephone System Contract Draws New Scrutiny
The CityTime technology contract scandal has cast many doubts on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's other expensive IT programs. The Gothamist has reported that suspicion has grown in connection with the out-of-control costs associated with a technology upgrade to New York City's 911 emergency telephone system.
''The City Time scandal had already been a point of contention between the Bloomberg administration and City Comptroller John Liu, and now their fight has spread to the City's emergency services. Yesterday Liu's office rejected a $286 million contract request for the city's Emergency Communications Transformation Program, (ECTP), an effort to update the city's 911 system—a project that, incidentally, was initially budged at $380 million and has since ballooned to $666 million.''
Now that the Comptroller Liu has finally started showing up to the office as Comptroller and not a candidate for mayor, maybe he will expose other black holes in the city budget ?
Firefighter criticises Mayor Bloomberg's draconian budget cuts to FDNY and controversial Unified Call Taker-911 dispatch and emergency call system.
On the Queens Crap blog, an anonymous FDNY firefighter has submitted a comment that draws attention to the complete failure of New York City's UCT-911 emergency call system. "Over 10 preventable fire fatalities so far because of UCT911[.] DONT LET THIS CONTINUE!!" wrote the firefighter, who submitted the anonymous comment. As far away as the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom, it was reported that, as a result of yesterday's tornado-like microburst storm, "The city's 911 switchboards were inundated with calls of injuries, a Fire Department spokesman said."
The New York Daily News has criticised the Bloomberg administration's funding of the controversial UCT 911 dispatch system for its dangerous flaws. The Uniformed Firefighters Association has also criticised the UCT 911 dispatch system for errors that can result in threats to public safety.
"The $2-billion project is meant to shave seconds off emergency response times, and it includes the Unified Call Taker system, which Fire Department unions have condemned, saying that it resulted in units being sent to wrong addresses."
Meanwhile, according to the following YouTube video : "Leaders of three FDNY uniformed unions joined together to speak out and detail how the Bloomberg Administration's new 911 Unified Call Taking (UCT) dispatch system is 'fatally flawed.' "
