Nobel Peace Laureates Slam The U.S. Over Bradley Manning Case

Nobel Peace Prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Northern Irish activist Mairead Maguire, and Argentine artists Adolfo Pérez Esquivel have authored a statement to be published in an upcoming issue of The Nation that condemns the United States’ persecution of the 24-year-old Army private and implores the rest of America to question the country’s secretive torture of a soldier that the prize winners say defended democracy.

“As people who have worked for decades against the increased militarization of societies and for international cooperation to end war, we are deeply dismayed by the treatment of Pfc Bradley Manning,” the laureates write.

Left unaddressed by the Nobel laureates was why supposedly progressive, LGBT politicians, such as Christine Quinn, are questionably silent about the persecution of PFC Manning.

Read more : Nobel laureates slam the US over Bradley Manning case

Hurricane Sandy Occupy Thanksgiving Feast

Organisers at St. Mark's Church in the East Village were hosting a Thanksgiving feast for survivors of Hurricane Sandy.

Russian Lawsuit Against Madonna Is Dismissed

A Russian court rejected a $10 million lawsuit against Madonna on Thursday by a group of anti-gay activists who accused her hurting their feelings by promoting homosexuality at a St. Petersburg concert. Judge Vitaly Barkovsky did not explain his decision but also ruled the activists should compensate legal expenses to companies which organized Madonna's concert. The activists said they will appeal the court ruling. Homosexuality, punished with jail terms in the Soviet Union, was decriminalized in Russia in 1993, but much of the gay community remains underground as prejudice runs deep. (Reuters)

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Line Clogging Demonstration At Golden Farm (Nov. 21)

On the busy day before Thanksgiving, activists demonstrated for union rights at Golden Farm grocery store in Brooklyn.

The owner of a YouTube channel called Matt H. posted this video yesterday of a direct action demonstration in support of employees, who want to unionise at the Golden Farm grocery store in Brooklyn.

On November 21, I stopped by a picket being held outside the Golden Farm grocery store on Church Ave and 4th St. The group was picketing in support of workers rights and union benefits. Their demands were : fair pay and compensation for when they made below minimum wage ; holidays off ; and personal days off. The majority of the time was spent with a picket outside the store. About 12 Minutes were spent inside the store doing what was called a "line clog." It was hilarious...

Among the activists, who took part in this demonstration, were members of OccuEvolve.

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Christine Quinn Betrays The LGBT Community

Christine Quinn Betrays Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgenders :

What measurable, real, and tangible actions have openly lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinn taken in respect of LGBT civil rights ?

Let's examine the following examples of LGBT civil rights violations, to which City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a high-profile openly lesbian politician, has been spineless in her response :

• When over 30 men where being entrapped and were the targets of sexual orientation profiling by the NYPD, what did Christine Quinn do ? That's right, she did nothing to hold the NYPD accountable for their systematic discrimination of LGBTQS men.
• In the interest of public health, New York City hands out free condoms, and then NYPD arrests LGBT New Yorkers for carrying condoms. And Speaker Quinn looks the other way, of course. Read more : New York City's Condom Bait-and-Switch
• Look at the case of Jabbar Campbell. If LGBT New Yorkers get beat up by haters, you can count on Speaker Quinn to elbow her way in for photo opportunities. But if the haters are NYPD officers, you can count on Speaker Quinn to look the other way.




• In her YouTube video announcing her mayoral campaign, Speaker Quinn did not say that she was a lesbian, and she did not mention her wife. Is this another case of self-hate or internalised homophobia ?
• Each year, Speaker Quinn allocates taxpayer money to support hate groups that discriminate against LGBT New Yorkers. Ask yourselves : What is an openly lesbian politician doing by funding groups that discriminate against LGBT New Yorkers ?
• On the evening when Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the historic marriage equality bill into law, the NYPD raided the Eagle Bar in yet another demonstration of sexual orientation profiling. What has Speaker Quinn done to hold the NYPD accountable for their systematic discrimination of the gay men patrons of the Eagle ? That's right, she's done nothing.
• Before New York State enacted its historic marriage equality law, Speaker Quinn was already being non-committal about fighting all the way to win, which is her usual strategy on everything.
• After the Obama administration violated the due process rights of an LGBT whistleblower, what did Speaker Quinn do ? She turned the other way and pretended not to look.
• When one of her own staffers, Tony Simone, dropped the F-bomb on gay rights leaders Allen Roskoff and Donny Moss, what did Speaker Quinn do ? She did nothing.
• When Mayor Michael Bloomberg appealed the 2005 landmark marriage equality ruling by Judge Doris Ling-Cohan, what did Christine Quinn do ? BINGO ! She did nothing.
• Speaker Quinn's position of Paid Sick Leave has ramifications for the LGBT community.
• Even though the stop-and-frisk policy of the NYPD targets the transgendered New Yorkers, Speaker Quinn supports NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who is adamant about maintaining the unconstitutional police program.
• When former Mayor Ed Koch passed away, lesbian NYC mayoral candidate Christine Quinn released a statement calling Koch a 'great mayor' and a 'great man,' even though Mr. Koch was mayor during a period of time during which the AIDS epidemic broke out -- a crisis that many have said Koch essentially ignored during his time in office. Many AIDS activists found Speaker Quinn's statement tone deaf and dismissive of the tens of thousands of local AIDS deaths attributable to the former mayor.
• Related : Two gay men explain their beef with Christine Quinn

With an LGBT record like this, LGBTQS New Yorkers would do good to question Speaker Quinn's integrity and commitment to LGBT civil rights.

Make a pledge today to support Roots of Betrayal : The Ethics of Christine Quinn on Kickstarter.

Hilarious Parody of Petraeus Scandal

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Rolling Jubilee $8 Million Update

(Revised : Thursday 22 Nov 2012 1:15 p.m. EDT) The Rolling Jubilee has now raised over $400,000, which is approximately enough money to abolish over $8,000,000 in notional debt !

Thomas Gokey, an artist who is one of the co-founders of the Rolling Jubilee movement, an Occupy Wall Street off-shoot that raises money to buy debt and then “forgive” what people owe rather than collecting on the bills. (Current TV)

Hurricane Sandy Healthcare Rally at City Hall

New York City doctors and nurses are sounding a public health alarm on the stressed hospital network after Sandy.

Healthcare activists held a rally on the steps of New York's City Hall to demand that Mayor Michael Bloomberg do more to improve healthcare for survivors of Hurricane Sandy.

Sandy's floodwaters severely damaged NYU Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital, Coney Island Hospital, and Manhattan's VA Medical Center. Patients who would have sought care at those facilities are now turning to other hospitals that remain open. (WNBC)

Emergency room doctor Marisa Fernandez, who has been volunteering in the badly damaged Rockaways neighborhood, said, "We're having to recreate an entire healthcare infrastructure from scratch—everything ranging from assessment and triage of newly housebound individuals, to mobile clinics." (Zimbio)

Despite what some hospital administrators have claimed, Sandy turned out to be exactly what weather forecasters were predicting, so while the Manhattan VA and NY Downtown were evacuated before the storm hit, Bellevue, Coney Island and NYU Langone waited until after. We can't say for sure why--but certainly the loss of revenue may have been a factor in that decision. Even public hospitals depend on reimbursements from patient visits to stay financially viable. (Socialist Worker)

City Hall Protest Against Bloomberg's Inadequate Healthcare Response To Hurricane Sandy

Meet at City Hall this Friday, 11/16, at 12:00 p.m. to tell Mayor Bloomberg that there are urgent unmet healthcare needs caused by Hurricane Sandy !

Date : Friday, November 16, 2012

Time : 12:00 Noon

Place : City Hall

2012-11-16 Mike Bloomberg City Hall - Hurricane Sandy Relief Rally Flyer

St. John's Episcopal Hospital At Capacity, Upper East Side Residents Complain About Hospital Crisis

After Peninsula Hospital closed, St. John's became the only full-service hospital in Far Rockaway. It is now operating at 100% capacity, meaning, it has no more room to take in patients. This condition is compounded by the fact that patients have nowhere to be discharged to, and by the fact that many of the employees have become homeless as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

Nearby nursing homes and adult homes have been evacuated and are not yet re-opened. Electricity continues to be a problem throughout the area and patients with special needs may have lost homes or cannot go back to homes without electricity or heat. Staff, many of them without homes or who have been evacuated, also need places to stay so they can continue to work. Homeless staff are given vouchers for hot meals.

St. John's has set up two funds for donations. To donate to St. John's Episcopal Hospital to continue its efforts to serve the community, please make a check out to St. John's Episcopal Hospital and mail it to St. John's Episcopal Hospital, 327 Beach 19th Street, Far Rockaway, NY 11691. To donate to the Hurricane Sandy Staff Relief Fund, please make the check out to St. John's Episcopal Hospital, and write in the memo "Hurricane Sandy Staff Relief Fund" and mail to the above-mentioned address. To pay by Paypal or Credit Card go to www.ehs.org.

Separately, WCBS 2 News did a piece about how the people in the Upper East Side are now beginning to complain about all the people from Lower Manhattan swarming their hospitals.

Maybe it is going to take complaints by UES residents to ring alarm bells about the uneven distribution of hospital beds in Lower Manhattan ?

NYY Langone Payroll Heard On The Street

NYU employees of the closed buildings will not be paid after November. Meanwhile, the Board Of Trustees are midway through a $3 billion capital raising program.

NYC Hurricane Sandy - Hospital Evacuations and Berger Commission - FAIL

Why is it acceptable for us to allow hospitals go through such desperate attempts to equally and adequately fund the healthcare needs of patients ? Look at the consequences of the blackouts of New York City hospitals in Lower Manhattan.

The issue before us is whether the rebuilding of our hospitals will continue to favour wealthy institutions, which primarily serve the well-insured, or will we use this opportunity to examine and fix the unequal distribution of healthcare in New York created by the Berger Commission ?

As it is, we are on a path that will continue to force us to accept less and less. Look at how nursing homes were instructed by health officials not to evacuate, and then they are criticised by the Department of Health for unacceptable conditions compounded precisely because they were instructed not to evacuate. Is this acceptable ?

If we believe in the dignity and equality of all people, then our healthcare system must be reformed to provide patient care-centered healthcare, to equally meet the needs of all patients. Please support a truly universal, single-payer healthcare system.

Obama Wins, reports CNN

CNN reports that it projects that President Obama wins.

Coney Island Election Problems

2013 New York City Mayoral Candidate Bill Thompson posted this photograph on Facebook with this caption :

"I just witnessed chaos at 2950 West 33rd Street poll site in Coney Island. The site didn't open until after 9 a.m., and then the machines were not ready. This is the line to vote."

I posted a comment on the photograph, thanking Mr. Thompson for sharing this information. I also asked Mr. Thompson if he would help bring reforms to the Board of Elections. Later in the day, when I went to blog this photo, I noticed that I had been unfriended by Mr. Thompson. So, I guess he won't agree to help bring reforms to the Board of Elections ?

Bellevue Morgue Under Water

In a post about the final two patients still remaining at Bellevue Hospital, The New York Times obtained details about some of the severe conditions inside the hospital's morgue :

The sources also said that after Hurricane Sandy hit, the Bellevue morgue was under water, so the bodies of patients who died of their illnesses after the storm had to be kept elsewhere. Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner, confirmed that the Bellevue morgue had been flooded, but that with the assistance of the medical examiner, the bodies had been put on higher racks to keep them out of the water.

She did not know how many bodies there were. Ms. Borakove said the medical examiner’s morgue, which is separate, remained dry.

What is missing from these incremental reports about the deteriorating conditions at many hospitals in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is the failure of the mayor's emergency management plan that did not anticipate for infrastructure failures.

Not only that, but the New York State Department of Health has responsibility, for the irresponsible distribution of hospital beds in Manhattan. After nine New York City hospitals have closed, how do Gov. Andrew Cuomo ; Dr. Nirav Shah, the Secretary of the State Department of Health ; Stephen Berger, who continues to advocate for still yet more hospital closings ; and other statue health officials now view the issue of reducing the number of hospitals, when a mass civilian trauma event or natural disaster can destroy the infrastructure of the fewer remaining hospitals we have now ?

Here's an Associated Press video of the beginning of the evacuation of Bellevue Hospital :