Sal Albanese looks at exploitation of LICH closure through political lens of post-Bloomberg New York

LICH Leftovers : Mayor de Blasio has been very quiet about the closure of Long Island College Hospital on his watch, outraging the community allies he exploited to use LICH as a campaign prop to get elected.

RELATED LICH Leftovers (The Huffington Post)

"The powers that be back down from a public fight only to pull the plug in a backroom deal days later," wrote former New York City Councilmember Sal Albanese about the bitter fight to save Long Island College Hospital. Mr. Albanese's essay, published on The Huffington Post, is his second installment on the post-election political realities playing out in New York City. His first essay in this series was published earlier this month. The allusion to backroom deals is a damning indictment of how Mayor Bill de Blasio has abdicated his public health policy responsibility to voters with LICH closing on his watch. "But LICH already served its purpose as de Blasio's campaign prop," Mr. Albanese concluded, informing voters about how duplicitous Mr. de Blasio was in last year's mayoral campaign. Let's hope more voters read Mr. Albanese's writings and follow him on Twitter. Mr. Albanese's political analysis offers voters an unvarnished truth about how politics plays out in New York City -- sadly, often to the detriment of voters' demands for reforms.

The New York Times wakes up to a harsh reality about de Blasio's piling examples of selling out

PUBLISHED : WED, 08 JUN 2014, 01:46 PM
UPDATED : THURS, 13 JUN 2014, 19:35 PM

The NYTimes' Ginia Bellafante on Mayor Bill de Blasio : The absence of any real template for governing from the vantage point of economic liberalism

RELATED For de Blasio, Deals, Drama and (Maybe) Progress (The New York Times)

In today's Sunday edition of The New York Times, the columnist Ginia Bellafante examined new mayor Bill de Blasio's record of broken campaign promises and other compromises in his young administration. "For years since, you could get by calling yourself a liberal in New York State politics simply by loving pro-choice arguments and same-sex marriage as much as you loved Wall Street and real estate developers. That is no longer so, which leaves centrists moving toward compromises that look semi-noble, and liberals in the position of seeming to have settled for too little and sacrificed their souls too much." On the closure of Long Island College Hospital, Ms. Bellafante wrote that, "the sense that Mr. de Blasio exploited the issue, declared victory in the face of a loss and then moved on has clearly taken hold." Ms. Bellafante's observation is backed up by a column by Liza Featherstone in amNewYork : "Bill de Blasio betrayed his believers in Cobble Hill," in which the author of the column wrote : "There are signs de Blasio is willing to fight for ordinary New Yorkers. Additional paid sick leave and universal pre-K are nothing to dismiss. But when the interests of ordinary New Yorkers conflict with those of the real estate industry, which donated heavily to de Blasio's campaign, is Mayor 99 Percent setting aside his protest placards? Many in Cobble Hill think so." In respect of the de Blasio administration's plans to preserve affordable housing, Ms. Bellafante noted that there was a "mounting sense that he has reneged on promises to involve neighborhoods in decisions that intimately affect them." This is backed-up by the relentless postings on the Atlantic Yards Report blog, and you can begin by reading this post : "As de Blasio announces affordable housing plan, Atlantic Yards (delay, modular, lack of neighborhood planning) remains an awkward backdrop," in which the author of the blog noted of the mayor's affordable housing plan : "There was no mention of the planned affordable housing that he and others cited to justify their support for Atlantic Yards, likely because that housing has taken so long to be built--and perhaps because it recalls the absence of ground-up neighborhood planning." (emphasis added) With respect to Mayor de Blasio enabling Gov. Cuomo to lock up the Working Families Party nomination, Ms. Bellafante wrote : "When Mr. de Blasio recently facilitated a deal between the leftist Working Families Party and Mr. Cuomo to secure the organization’s endorsement of the governor for re-election, it pushed certain quarters of the left toward lamentation." This is backed up by one of numerous tweets in the aftermath of the WFP deal to endorse Gov. Cuomo, brokered by Mayor de Blasio, such as this one by Tom Watson : "Still some surprise/horror that progressive deBlasio cut a deal with Cuomo in the #WFP saga. Of course he did, it's politics." (emphasis added) Ms. Bellafante also provided a balance to her criticism, by noting some achievements in Mayor de Blasio's first five months in office. Taken as a whole, Ms. Bellafante's article is an indication that growing liberal disappointment with Mayor de Blasio is seeping into the pages of The New York Times, something that took 15 years to happen with former Council Speaker Christine Quinn's political career. This change is due to the impatience with which voters now express about political deals made between politicians that betray campaign promises, such as with the embarrassing Working Families Party endorsement, an observation that Ms. Bellafante herself made when she wrote, "What looked like a mayoral assertion of authority to some felt like abdication to others."

de Blasio's high poll numbers amongst minority electorate may sink, if the NYPD continue their racially-tinged, broken windows policing tactics

RELATED Mayor de Blasio’s Approval Rating Improves, Poll Finds (The New York Times)

A majority of Black and Latino voters said that they approved of the job Mayor de Blasio was doing, a new poll shows, The New York Times reported. But it is not clear that this new poll factored in the immense anger in the Harlem community in response to a shock and awe invasion by the New York Police Department to round up innocent young public housing tenants on trumpted up charges of conspiracy to commit gang activities. Already, the new poll shows that the new mayor has lost more than half of the support amonst whites. If the police continue their crackdown that targets people of color, it won't be too far long before the mayor loses support amongst his minority base.

Justin Bieber Macy's Commercial

Justin Bieber in Macy's Black Friday Commercial : Grown Men Scream Like Teenage Girls.

North Shore-Rudin PR Campaign ?

The community of the Lower West Side of Manhattan are outraged over a deceptive political campaign brochure that was mailed to residents in connection with a proposed first aid clinic that may replace St. Vincent's Hospital.

Community anger has reached a new high, such that one member has launched a new blog, Every Minute Matters, to counter the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent by North Shore-LIJ and the Rudin family, to make sure that their greedy hundred million dollar condo conversion deal goes through.

The slick mass mailer is an act of political subterfuge, community residents say, because it is being mailed by a front group calling itself the ''Westside Healthcare Coalition.'' (A WhoIs search on Network Solutions today showed that the website for the front group is registered to Mehigan, Bellone & Associates, Inc.) The intention of this fake political brochure can only be to intentionally confuse the public between the front group and the real group called the Coälition For A New Village Hospital. The real group has been fighting for over one year to, at first, save St. Vincent's Hospital from closing. Then, once the hospital closed under shady conditions, the real Coälition has been fighting in court to save the hospital buildings and zoning, so that a new hospital can open on the location of the former St. Vincent's site.

Here is an anonymous line item review of what some community members describe as deceptive advertising that is printed on the controversial political brochure, which was mailed through the U.S. Postal Service :

West Side Healthcare Coalition is a Lie

The community isn't surprised that the axis of evil (aka North Shore-LIJ-Rudin Family) would resort to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sick and twisted public relations stunt ; the Rudin family stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's Hospital. Even in the face of these deceptive political advertisements that are being mailed to city residents, the community continues to be likewise outraged by the veil of silence around City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who have taken no concrete actions to save St. Vincent's.