The recent announcement of New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s candidacy in the Democratic primary for the mayoralty is a dangerous political phenomenon. A few simple facts will suffice to show why she is unsuitable for any city-wide elective office.

First, in 2008 Quinn, at the behest of current Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “complex reworking of post-fiscal crisis neoliberalization,” subverted the constitutional process of two public referenda in 1993 and 1996 that imposed a two-term limit for elected officials in the City of New York. As a result of her backroom brokering, the City Council voted to change term limits and allow for the mayor, City Council members and borough presidents to run for third terms. In effect, this reversed the results of the two previous public referenda. Quinn and Bloomberg proceeded to run for third terms. In a stroke of political payback, after public advocate Betsy Gotbaum denounced the Quinn chicanery, the City Council passed a budget in June 2009 that gave Gotbaum’s office a 40 percent cut.

Secondly, in April 2008, The New York Post reported that Quinn’s office had appropriated millions of dollars to bogus organizations and that the money was then secretly siphoned to organizations favored by individual council members. Records showed that nearly a quarter of the secret slush funds went to organizations in Quinn’s Council District 3, and that two of the biggest recipients of the funds contributed to Quinn’s expected 2009 mayoral run before she derailed it at Bloomberg’s behest.

Quinn’s recent propaganda of her support for the “middle class” is a logic textbook case of equivocation ostensibly purporting to champion the socio-economic aspirations of the working and lower middle classes to garner their votes. Yet the bulk of her record supported “the Bloomberg Way … for control of urban governance … to refashion the city to serve as an instrument of postindustrial capitalist accumulation” for the rich and upper middle classes. Hailing from Glen Cove, Nassau County, Quinn is not a native New York City resident, but rather an insidious carpetbagger pursuing the same agenda of Bloomberg’s fascist corporatism and “aversion to democratic planning and oversight” coupled to lesbian feminist special interests. Quinn belongs in jail, not in any public office in New York City.

Joseph Manago is a former professor of biomedical sciences at NYU. Email him at [email protected].