Christine Quinn Declares City Hall Bid

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn officially threw her hat into the race for City Hall this morning with an announcement on Twitter and the release of a video ad.

In the video, Quinn, seated on a couch in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's apartment, offered the rationale for her City Hall bid:

"I am running for mayor because I love this city.

I love how over the last 12 years we have taken many of the wonderful and distinctive businesses in the city, forced them out of business because of sky-rocketing rents and onerous fees, and replaced them with frozen yogurt chain shops and branches of JP Morgan Chase bank.

I love that we have rezoned much of the city so that neighborhood after neighborhood begins to look the same, with steel and paper mache condo and rental towers dotting the skyline from Williamsburg to downtown Brooklyn to Long Island City to Hell's Kitchen.

Who needs neighborhoods with affordable housing when we can sell the city out to the crooked real estate companies who can build crappy new construction that won't last past the twenty year tax subsidies the city gives them?

I love that downtown Manhattan no longer has a hospital, that we closed St.Vincent's and sold it to real estate developers who also have given money to my campaign treasury, because who needs a hospital in the West Village when we have Bellevue and NYU Medical down in the East 30's?

It's not like anything will ever happen to close those two hospitals down, so why worry about a lack of hospital beds or emergency services in Manhattan?

I love how we have closed all the neighborhood schools in this city and turned much of that space over to charter school operators who pick and choose which students they will educate and which ones they will toss to the "failing" public school system.

Why should public schools be public when we can privatize them and I can take money from their operators and backers?

I love that we were able to overturn the will of the people and ram threw a third (illegal) term for my mentor and mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and myself, even though New York City residents had twice voted for term limits on both the mayor and the city council.

Think about all the additional damage Mayor Bloomberg was able to do these past four years, how many additional schools he was able to close, how many more neighborhoods he was able to rezone, how many more tax subsidies he was able to give to his real estate and business cronies, how much more money the crooked outside consultants Mike loves to hire got to steal.

This could not have happened without my engineering the overturning of term limits in the City Council and overturning the will of the people!

Finally, I just want to say that I want this city to be a place where only rich people can afford to live or purchase anything.

That's why I have consistently sold out to the real estate and business interests, time and time again, giving them what they want.

And that's why I have shifted my political priorities over the years, gone from a "liberal" on the issues that matter most to my campaign contributors to a consistent "yes vote" for whatever they need.

Because they provide me with cash and have helped me get to where I am - City Council Speaker and soon-to-be Mayor of New York City.

Thank you and I look forward to selling you up the river in the future."