Union representatives from Local 375 and DC 37, community activists, New York City taxpayers, and others gathered at 1250 Broadway in a demonstration against the technology company known as SAIC.
For years, newspaper and television reporters, bloggers, and whistle blowers have been reporting details of a massive taxpayer fraud perpetrated by New York City officials, by employees of SAIC and of another company known as Technodyne, and possibly by lobbyists in connection with the scandalous CityTime project.
The CityTime project began with an original budget of approximately $60 million, but has since ballooned to over $700 million.
The U.S. Attorney's Office has begun an investigation, but nobody yet knows how high this scandal, and other technology consultancy contract scandals, may go up the Bloomberg administration.
Imagine what I could do, if I did this full-time ... ?
Une lesbienne, future maire de New York?
A lesbian, future mayor of New York?
Par ALEXIS BUISSON
By ALEXIS BUISSON
Et si le prochain maire de New York était une lesbienne? La «speaker» ouvertement homo de la ville, Christine Quinn, est pressentie pour succéder à Michael Bloomberg en 2013.
Will the next mayor of New York be a lesbian? The openly gay "speaker" of the city, Christine Quinn, is tipped to succeed Michael Bloomberg in 2013.
Le malheur des uns fait le bonheur des autres. L'humiliante chute du chouchou des sondages pour la mairie de New York, l'élu démocrate du Queens Anthony Weiner, dans une rocambolesque affaire de «sexting» sur Twitter, a relancé la course pour le poste de maire. L'actuelle «speaker» de la ville, sorte de président du conseil municipal, Christine Quinn fait désormais figure de favorite. Si elle est élue en 2013, elle serait la première femme à occuper ce poste. La première lesbienne aussi.
The misfortune of some is the good luck of others. The humiliating fall in the polls by the darling candidate for mayor of New York, Queens-elected Democrat Anthony Weiner, in an incredible case of "sexting" on Twitter, has re-energized the race for mayor. The current "speaker" of the city, a sort of president of the city council, Christine Quinn is now a favorite figure. If elected in 2013, she would be the first woman to hold this position. The first lesbian, too.
Véritable pile électrique, la démocrate de 44 ans, descendante d'une rescapée irlandaise du naufrage du Titanic, est entrée dans la vie politique à 24 ans. Elle a participé en tant qu'assistante à l'élection de Tom Duane, premier conseiller municipal ouvertement gay de New York. Elle a ensuite servi comme directrice du New York Anti Violence Project, une association qui lutte contre la violence envers les LGBT.
Electrically-charged, the Democrat, 44, descendant of an Irish survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, entered politics at age 24. She participated as an assistant to the election of Tom Duane, the first openly gay city councilman of New York. She then served as director of the New York Anti-Violence Project, an organization that fights violence against LGBT people.
Longtemps dans le placard
En 1999, elle fait son entrée au conseil municipal de New York comme l'élue des bastions homos de Chelsea et de Greenwich Village. Pendant la campagne, ces adversaires, dont deux gays, l'accusent d'être hétérosexuelle pour la décrédibiliser! En vain. Elle devient «speaker» en 2006, soit le deuxième personnage politique de la ville derrière le maire.
Long in the closet
In 1999 she entered the New York City Council, voted in by the bastions of gay Chelsea and Greenwich Village. During the campaign, these opponents, including two gay, accused her of being heterosexual to discredit her ! In vain. She became "speaker" in 2006, the second-highest political figure of the city behind the mayor.
Eduquée dans des écoles catholiques en dehors de New York, elle est longtemps restée dans le placard. Aujourd'hui, les droits des LGBT font partie de ses chevaux de bataille. Son combat du moment: la légalisation du mariage homo dans l'Etat de New York. Devant les législateurs d'Albany, la capitale de l'Etat, elle évoque régulièrement son union avec l'avocate d'affaire Kim Catullo pour pointer l'injustice de la situation actuelle.
Educated in Catholic schools outside of New York, she had long been in the closet. Today, LGBT rights are part of her proverbial war arsenal. Her struggle of the moment : the legalization of gay marriage in the State of New York. Before legislators in Albany, the state capital, she regularly refers to his union with the business lawyer Kim Catullo to point to the injustice of the current situation.
Embarquée par la police
Aussi à l'aise dans les assemblées politiques que dans la rue, Quinn est de toutes les manifestations pro-homos de grande ampleur. Elle a même été embarquée par la police en marge de plusieurs défilés new-yorkais de la Saint Patrick, pour avoir tenté de s'infiltrer dans ces cortèges où gays et lesbiennes n'ont pas droit de cité.
Board by the police
Equally at home in political assemblies in the street, Quinn is sure to be at all pro-gay events of great magnitude. She has even been arrested by the police in conjunction with the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York, for trying to infiltrate these processions in which gays and lesbians have illegally told they have no place.
Malgré son engagement, Christine Quinn ne fait pas toujours l'unanimité chez les homos new-yorkais. Plusieurs groupes lui ont reproché son soutien en 2008 à une loi qui a notamment permis au maire Michael Bloomberg de se présenter pour un troisième mandat. Bloomberg était dans leur collimateur depuis février 2005. Il avait alors fait appel de la décision d'un juge de Manhattan stipulant que l'illégalité du mariage homo à New York violait la constitution de l'Etat. Une poignée de militants gays l'a bruyamment rappelé à la «Speaker» mi-mai, en manifestant en marge d'un événement de levée de fonds pour sa campagne. «Si Christine Quinn croyait vraiment dans les droits des LGBT, pourquoi a-t-elle récompensé Bloomberg d'un troisième mandat?» peut-on lire sur le blog Christine Quinn Sold Out, une plateforme anti-Quinn.
Si elle était élue, elle ne serait pas la première lesbienne à diriger une grande ville américaine. En 2009, Annise Parker a été élue à la mairie de Houston... au Texas (lire notre article). Tout est possible.
If elected, she would not be the first lesbian to head a major American city. In 2009, Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston ... Texas (see our article). Anything is possible.
Christine Quinn's ''Dream'' Fundraiser Turns into ''Nightmare'' as Her Personal Assistant Screams the F-Bomb to St. Vincent's Protesters.
LGBTQ activists, Health care activists, government transparency activists, public official integrity activists, and animal rights activists held a flashmob protest outside City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's fundraiser at Dream nightclub tonight in Chelsea.
Many LGBTQ activists and allies joined the emergency protest organised outside Speaker Quinn's fundraiser. Many LGBTQ activists said they believe that Speaker Quinn should have started fighting for marriage equality in 2005, back when Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the appeal of a landmark gay marriage ruling. In all her time in public office, Speaker Quinn has subjugated herself to the misogynist domination of Mayor Bloomberg.
Donny Moss, left, with Allen Roskoff, right -- officers of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club -- protesting outside tonight's fundraiser organised by Christine Quinn.
Still yet other protesters held up signs as a reminder to the U.S. Justice Department that nobody has yet to be indicted in Speaker Quinn's office for her role in the City Council slush fund scandal.
Tony Simone, photographed right, a NYC official who is paid $113,000.00 in taxpayer money each year (plus opaque discretionary member item bonuses) and who reports directly to Speaker Quinn, left, told the St. Vincent's protesters, “F*ck you!” outside Speaker Quinn’s fundraising event at the ”Dream” nightclub in Chelsea.
It was noted in this space last week how well Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez fares in City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s annual tax-dollar giveaway.
There have been developments.
Lopez, a state assemblyman and the subject of a federal corruption investigation, needed a front-end loader to haul away the so-called member-item cash lavished on him in the new city budget by Quinn — who used four pliant council members as cutouts.
But it turns out that Quinn took a fire ax to Queens Councilman Peter Vallone’s share of the boodle.
Vallone is a truly singular council member, in the sense that he has thus far managed to avoid attracting the attention of federal prosecutors, and it seems unlikely that he ever will.
But he irked Quinn by vocally opposing the renaming of the Queensboro Bridge in honor of former Mayor Ed Koch — so the speaker slashed his member-item take by 42%, or roughly $600,000.
Let’s be clear: Nobody should be getting member-item money.
These are lump-sum appropriations that corrupt the political process by giving incumbents cash to curry unfair favor with constituents; simultaneously, these cash goodies give bullying council bosses undue leverage over their underlings.
And Vallone — who apparently irritated Quinn and had his cash yanked as an example — proves the point.
Yet Quinn is cool with Lopez, who attracts the FBI like overripe pork attracts flies. Quinn channeled $4.4 million this year to his Brooklyn power base — the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council — through Brooklyn council members Domenic Recchia, Erik Dilan, Stephen Levin and Elizabeth Crowley.
While some $3.75 million is earmarked for alleged “capital construction,” the rest neatly covers salary and benefits for:
* Chris Fisher, Ridgewood executive director/Lopez campaign treasurer ($607,000).
(Quinn also managed to find $2 million for the United Federation of Teachers’ academically shaky charter school — but that’s a tale for another day.)
One final note: Quinn is many things — brash, personable, ambitious, maybe New York City’s next mayor.
But we’ve never thought her to be petty.
Until now.
Because she wasn’t content with punishing just Vallone for his temerity. She also took it out on the councilman’s father — former Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr., arguably the last person to perform the office’s duties with decorum and dignity.
Cut from the budget was $6 million for a City University public-policy program named in his honor.
That’s the Vallones’ loss, to be sure.
But mostly it’s the city’s.
Christine Quinn should be ashamed.
Meanwhile, check out what other blogs are saying about this latest disgraceful turn about Speaker Quinn's slush fund scandal :
Op-Ed Bonus ! What a disgrace. How does Christine Quinn find hundreds of thousands of dollars for an indicted political slime ball, and millions in aggregate monies for member items, but she could not find $1 to save St. Vincent's Hospital in her very own city council district? This is sick and twisted. When are the over-taxed, over-fined, over-ticketed, over-tolled, over-run people of New York City going to wake up and vote Christine Quinn out of office? I realise that LGBTQ people want to rally around a leader, but damn, can't we pick one with a little bit of integrity? How about just a minimal standard of integrity? Is there a lowest common denominator of integrity we can demand out of LGBTQ leaders? How about a lowest expectations of integrity? If we scraped the bottom of Christine Quinn's diluted soup pan of weakened integrity broth, would we find any integrity sediment at all?
Bankruptcy Judge Cecelia Morris has let the management of St. Vincent's avoid Freedom of Information requests and has let the Rudin Family to gut St. Vincent's and is about to let the Family take a wrecking ball to it. Now, Judge Morris is going to let the Management and the Family destroy evidence.
Management of St. Vincent's Asks Bankruptcy Court to Approve Document Destruction, So That No Investigation Can Ever Determine Why the Hospital Closed Abruptly And Without Any Legally-Mandated Closure Plan.
No politician -- not CB2 Chair Brad Hoylman, not City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, or Senator Tom Duane -- is willing to do anything to prevent the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's. With the shredding trucks about to pull into the ambulance bays of St. Vincent's, the obstruction of justice will be complete : there may be no more hope to ever investigate the shady decisions that lead the hospital to close on April 30, 2010. It's exactly as Sarah Jessica Parker said : ''The community needs a hospital — and I think there’s been some clever obfuscation.''
During the 3 terms of the Bloomberg administration, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn kept approving each year's city budget, which included all the approvals and sign-offs on the CityTime cost over-runs.
During the Bloomberg-Quinn administration, lobbyists for the primary CityTime contractors, Scientific Applications International Corporation and Technodyne, kept teams of expensive lobbyists on their payroll to do exactly what ? Were lobbyists being paid to prevent any government agency to investigate the 2003 Richard Valcich letter ?
In 2003, Mr. Valcich was the Executive Director of the Office of Payroll Administration. In his 6 page letter to SAIC, Mr. Valcich questioned the motivations behind SAIC's poor performance on the CityTime contract ; SAIC kept dragging out deadlines and delivering product that Mr. Valcich described as "below acceptable standards."
As of the time of the writing of Mr. Valcich's letter, New York City had spent $35 million thus far on the doomed CityTime project. Current cost estimates put the price tag at over $700 million, of which $600 million has been described as "fraud."
During all this time, though, the principal outsourced companies working on CityTime were dispatching teams of lobbyists, to keep the cost over-runs being paid, and maybe for other motives.... The newsroom of WNYC, the public radio station, cannot pinpoint the exact role of the shady CityTime lobbyists.
"What prosecutors have yet to publicly discuss is the role played by former city officials from both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations that acted as lobbyists on behalf of SAIC and subcontractors such as New Jersey-based Technodyne. ...
"The city's lobbying database shows a small army of former prominent city officials who did work for SAIC and Technodyne. Defense contractor SAIC has retained former City Comptroller Liz Holtzman, Peter Powers, who served as Mayor Giuliani's top deputy Mayor for operations, and Seth Kaye, who worked in both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. Technodyne's lobbyists include former Bloomberg Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Gino Menchini and Agostino Cangemi, who also held key posts in both administrations.
"National Strategies, the lobbying firm that employs Menchini and Cangemi, says the firm had no role in CityTime and discontinued working "on general business procurement" for Technodyne as soon as the criminal allegations surfaced. (Another Technodyne lobbyist of record, Sal Salamone, was director of the Mayor’s Office of Computer Planning and has worked for SAIC.)"
No journalism outlet has yet to report the extent of lobbying by other CityTime subcontractors, such as Spherion and Gartner. If the lobbyists were trying to thwart any investigation into the $600 million CityTime fraud, would those lobbying activities rise to the level of obstruction of justice ?
Eileen Dunn, R.N., tells residents of the Lower West Side of Manhattan that Mayor Michael Bloomberg put the ''knife to the chest'' of St. Vincent's Hospital, and that the mayor is responsible for blocking the restoration of a hospital to the Lower West Side.
Community Activist Yetta Kurland presented a stack of over 7,500 signatures on a petition to a representative of the Rudin development family. The petition demands that the Rudin Family must be blocked from undertaking a luxury condominium conversion of the former site of St. Vincent's Hospital. In her presentation, Ms. Kurland explained the history of a prior deal that gave the Rudin Family use of a hardship exemption, but, which Ms. Kurland said, no longer applies. As William Rudin salivates over the condo conversion deal, Jane Jacobs is turning in her grave.
Too bad we can't count on Christine Quinn to fight for the healthcare of her own community.
Under the cover of darkness, over a holiday weekend, and in usual opaque fashion, Community Board 2 announced with very short notice a meeting for tomorrow that will keep pushing a first aid clinic to replace St. Vincent's Hospital.
JOINT LANDMARKS & PUBLIC AESTHETICS & ST. VINCENT’S OMNIBUS : Tues., 7/5 @ 6:30 PM– NYU Silver Building, 32 Waverly Pl. Room 208 - 30 Seventh Avenue (O’Toole Building) - Application for façade changes and new entrances. For more information go to: http://bit.ly/iNUSWj
If the U.S. Attorney General won't appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the CityTime scandal, can we ask Public Advocate Bill De Blasio to launch an independent ethics investigation into the Bloomberg-Quinn administration ?
Michael Bloomberg, our control-queen mayor who is famous for fighting for more and more mayoral control over everything, including public education, is spinning the tall tale that he was never in control over the fraud being committed during the cost over-runs during the CityTime payroll system scandal.
"The fraud-riddled CityTime payroll system is being transferred to the city's control in the wake of indictments, guilty pleas and the public demand by Mayor Bloomberg that he wants $600 million back from the company in charge of the project.
"Rather than rely on contractors caught up in the corruption scandal to oversee the system, the city will assemble a team of roughly 70 technicians under its own control -- including many who worked for the companies now under investigation," reported The New York Post.
"Buried in the agency's resolution was the surprising announcement that, come January, the city will seek new proposals for computerized payroll management," The Post report added.
During these three terms of Bloomberg mayoral control, he and Deputy Mayor Christine Quinn have complete and total control over the city budget, including approving appropriations of most, if not all, of the cost over-runs on the CityTime project. Will Mr. de Blasio do the right thing -- and launch an independent ethics investigation ? For more coverage, please visit the CityTime cover-up reporting by True News From Change.
Ask United States Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a federal special prosecutor to investigate the Bloomberg Administration and the City Council for the massive CityTime fraud.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday called for an almost complete $600 million refund of the fraudulent CityTime automated payroll system, reported Celeste Katz of The New York Daily News.
Mayor Bloomberg made his request for a refund in a letter addressed to Walter Havenstein, CEO of Science Applications International Corporation ; the letter has been released to the public.
The U.S. Congress also has some power to appoint a special prosecutor or special investigator, if Mr. Holder doesn't have the guts to investigate the Bloomberg-Quinn administration.
We need to take this investigation out of the hands of any city official, whose investigation budget depends on Mayor Bloomberg's or City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's oversight.
Marriage Equality Rally at City Hall on June 14 :
It's a Civil Rights Issue
Join the growing number of voices, who are saying that Gov. Andrew Cuomo should pull out all the stops -- and get marriage equality passed through the state legislature.
LGBT New Yorkers, who have faith or who follow a different spiritual journey, should not be the targets of religious rhetoric. Yet, a group of extremist and right-wing religious organisations are holding a press conference on Tuesday, June 14 from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm on the steps of New York City Hall. These extremist groups are asking all believers in the Lord to join in a day of fasting and prayer to invoke ''divine intervention'' to prevent the passage of Marriage Equality in New York State.
Connecting Rainbows, an LGBT civil rights group, is inviting all community groups, activists, and allies to join us -- and to spread the word to others -- about a counter demonstration that supporters of Marriage Equality are holding at the same time and at the same place : on Tuesday, June 14 at 11:30 a.m. on the steps of New York City Hall ! Please RSVP to the Marriage Equality Rally Facebook Event.
Connecting Rainbows is asking for a similar and powerful coälition of Marriage Equality groups to show up -- and to send a message that these religious organisations should be protecting the sanctity of LGBTQ lives, too. We are each somebody, and we each deserve full equality.
