Was Bill de Blasio always, already owned by shady real estate developers and lobbyists ?
VOCAL-NY amongst CPR community groups receiving over $7 million in FY15 City Council slush funds
Despite cheap "progressive" talk from mayor and new Council speaker, New York City Council is still disbursing speaker slush funds, even as one sitting Councilmember's funding had to be supervised due to pending corruption charges.
New York City Council Divvies Up $50 Million in Speaker Slush Funds http://t.co/jUmrGwJxMb via @WSJ
— Informed Voting (@informedvoting) June 25, 2014| RELATED New York City Council Divvies Up $50 Million in Speaker Slush Funds (The Wall Street Journal) | Slush funds allocated to VOCAL-NY include $25,000 for anti-Stop-and-Frisk workshops, even though Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned to end the "Stop-and-Frisk" era in NYPD policing. Following the Veal Pen Workshop for police reform at the Left Forum 2014, some of the member groups belonging to a coalition known as Communities United for Police Reform, or CPR, were shown to have influence over the stalled social movement to press the New York City government to deliver police reforms. When one of the stalling member groups in the CPR coalition, VOCAL-NY, was pressed about their role in deliberately deescalating public pressure for police reforms, a VOCAL-NY director, Jennifer Flynn Walker, had a meltdown on Twitter after activists pressed whether City Council slush funds played a role in CPR easing off pressure on the de Blasio-Mark-Viverito administration. "Professional" activists like Ms. Walker get a "seat at the table" next to powerholders, precisely because these "professional" activists accept government funding from the very politicians, who grassroots activists are targeting for legal reforms. Those government funding allocations come with implicit strings attached to not embarrass the politicians publicly, to not create any "scandals," and to settle for the low-bar "politics of the possible" that politicians, like Mayor Bill de Blasio, can deliver without upsetting his big money campaign donors. Some police reform activists believe that the mayor announced his controversial pick for NYPD commissioner to placate nervous billionaire real estate developers, who want to keep seeing escalating New York City real estate prices. The only way real estate prices can keep spiraling up out of control is by keeping all the youths and people of color either locked up in school or locked up in jail. Making do by accepting Mayor de Blasio's appointment of William Bratton as the new commissioner of the New York Police Department means that the City Council has to keep funding community programs to deal with police brutality and the violation of innocent people's rights. Indeed, the slush funds allocated to VOCAL-NY include $25,000 that are intended to "provide Know Your Rights workshops to inform people of their legal rights during police encounters (including stop, question and frisk) and role play de-escalation strategies in order to stay safe and calm." (Emphasis Added) |
|
CPR member groups receiving FY15 slush funds are : - Bronx Defenders : $1,636,000 - Legal Aid Society : $5,865,750 - New York City Anti-Violence Project : $186,755 - Streetwise & Safe : $10,000 - VOCAL-NY : $62,000 - Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice : $24,000 The controversial City Council practise of doling out slush funds was a hallmark issue in last year's mayoral campaign, and the slush fund allocations were used as an accusation of corruption against former Council Speaker Christine Quinn. According to her campaign promises, the new Council speaker, Councilmember Melissa Mark-Viverito, promised to bring reforms to the City Council never made possible under former Speaker Quinn's leadership. Alas, Speaker Mark-Viverito is using the shady distribution of slush funds to control strategic community groups for political reasons, which is no different from the motivations of her her predecessor. It's not known why VOCAL-NY still needs $25,000 for workshops that will train people how to deal with police use of "Stop-and-Frisk," if Mayor de Blasio campaigned to end the "Stop-and-Frisk" era at the NYPD. The right thing for VOCAL-NY to do is to come forward to press the mayor to deliver the full range of reforms at the NYPD that he supposedly gave lip service to in last year's mayoral election. Unless, of course, some of the CPR community groups are afraid to pressure the de Blasio-Mark-Viverito administration for the full range of legal reforms needed to end police brutality, violations of the Handschu Agreement, and other infringements of civil liberties and civil rights of innocent New Yorkers. For years, activist have wondered how could the City Council fund, on the one hand, police procedures that violate the Civil Rights Act protections of it citizens, at the same time when, on the other hand, the City Council is funding community groups for protection from police brutality ? What kind of duplicitous City Council budget are elected officials adopting ? |
2014-05-31 Veal Pen (Left Forum) Contact Sheet (Twitter Handles) (FINAL)(2014-06-25 FY15 Schedule C Slush F... by Connaissable
Bill de Blasio and Land Use : Liberal Mayoral Candidate Would Continue Many of Bloomberg's -- and Quinn's -- Policies
In the weeks leading up to Christine Quinn's defeat in the Democratic primary election, it came to be known that one of the slimy Rudin lobbyists responsible for influencing the City Council to approve the controversial St. Vincent's luxury condo conversion plan had already found a way to get access to Bill de Blasio, the presumptive leading mayoral candidate. Hosted on Scribd is an e-mail about the controversial lobbyist, James Capalino, that was exchanged between Donny Moss and I.
After a couple of weeks of careful consideration, I have produced a new YouTube video about this e-mail exchange.
One major reason that activists organised to vote Quinn out of office was because of how she sold out the community in favor of her campaign contributors and powerful big business interests. Real estate developers have enjoyed great influence over city government, so much so that voters have had almost no way of participating in important community decisions. For example, voters desired saving the zoning on the St. Vincent's campus for a replacement hospital, but big business interests were able to ride roughshod over voters because of their use of lobbyists and the outsized influence of campaign donations.
After the primary election, Bill de Blasio announced that he would not appear at fundraisers unless contributors could package together donations of at least $75,000. In addition to embracing lobbyists that helped Rudin privatise the former real estate of St. Vincent's, de Blasio was now embracing the out-sized influence of money in politics.
How could it be that activists, who carried the reform banner to organize and defeat Quinn in the mayoral primary, now turn the other way after de Blasio has now begun to adopt some the same tools of the broken political system as did Quinn ?
The concerns over who gets access to political candidates are serious. As some of you may know, when Andrew Cuomo was running for governor, some St. Vincent's activists approached his campaign people over the need for a hospital to replace St. Vincent's. Cuomo's campaign people told the St. Vincent's activists, "We'll see you after the election." After the election, what did Gov. Cuomo do ? Within days, he formed the Medicaid Redesign Team to continue the work of closing hospitals, and he appointed Stephen Berger to head the Brooklyn Working Group in an attempt to specifically close hospitals in Brooklyn. Similarly, some AIDS activists tried to reach out to the de Blasio campaign this year to determine if his campaign platform would include more ambitious goals to confront HIV/AIDS, but the AIDS activists were told by de Blasio's campaign people, "We'll see you after the election."
After all the community organizing, town halls, and protests in which activists have engaged to fight for a hospital to save St. Vincent's, just hearing the phrase, "We'll see you after the election," should activate a powerful recognition : that de Blasio means to make no public commitment to champion for the reforms that that many communities say they want to see brought about in the next mayoral administration.
Some activists, who participated in the movement to vote Quinn out of office, have been doing this work for over 22 years -- from the time when Quinn first arrived in the political scene in New York. It becomes too late to try to hold a politician accountable once the politician gets elected into office. Using Quinn as an example, she will have spent about 15 years in City Council spread out over 5 terms in office. During this time, in what direction has this city headed ? There was no way to hold her accountable during these 15 years, except to finally vote her out of office. That's the only way.
As challenging as it was to vote Quinn out of office, what lesson should we be drawing from this experience ? What wisdom is there to be had ? The reality is that Quinn was just a symptom of a broken political system. The root causes of the political system being broken still exist. In the last two years, our activism was influenced by important principles from the Occupy movement, and that is that inequality, corruption, and the undue influence of big business interests is what keeps our government broken and non-responsive to voters' needs. Knowing all that we know, do we wait for politicians to max out on term limits before they should be held accountable to voters, or should politicians be held accountable even before they win an election and are sworn into office ?
It all comes down to what you think, because it was you, who was made voiceless under the Bloomberg-Quinn administration. Our immediate contribution to push back against the broken political system was to vote Quinn out of office, but based on the messages that de Blasio is telegraphing to the community, voting Quinn out is not enough to bring about reforms. Now that she will soon be gone, what else do you need to do to reclaim your government ?
Please think about this, because the movement to bring about reforms is not over, yet. The movement needs you to step forward, because not everybody is fighting for reforms, and compromises are being made that may not serve your best interests. The only way for you to make sure that your best interests are being served is for you to step up and speak out. Your voice and opinion counts. Make it be heard.
