ALLEN DAWSON, A RACIST ON THE LOOSE AT WORKFORCE1 IN STATEN ISLAND, AND ON THE STREET;

UP FRONT News December 30, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

ALLEN DAWSON, A RACIST ON THE LOOSE AT WORKFORCE1 IN STATEN ISLAND,
AND ON THE STREET; PROTECTED BY NYC DEPARTMENT OF SMALL BUSINESS SERVICES. A CHURCH AND STATE ISSUE.

By Tom Weiss

Racism, a repulsive phenomenon that perhaps ironically transcends ethnic boundaries, is alive in Staten Island in New York City. To be sure, racism abounds throughout this city, state, nation and the world, but Staten Island is going to have a tough time shedding a stereotype as New York's modern day version of the Old South or perhaps 1930's Vienna or parts of 20th and 21st century Africa, where one can be murdered because of skin color or other ethnic differences (e.g. Hutus vs.Tutsis and the reported murders of albinos in Africa).

I first encountered Allen Dawson in the spring of 2008 when he was sitting next to me at a computer at Workforce1, an employment assistance agency located at 60 Bay Street in the St. George section of Staten Island, a short walk from the ferry. Workforce1 is operated for profit by a Texas-based outfit called Arbor Education & Training, which contracts with the New York City Department of Small Business Services (SBS), an agency under the control of the Mayor. Regardless of any statistical manipulations Arbor is able to manufacture to justify the continuation of a contract paid for by our taxes, Workforce1 in Staten Island is a citadel of negligence, incompetence and, most assuredly racism. And as far as I am able to determine, Mayor Bloomberg doesn't seem to care. As an example of the incompetence there under the ethically and administratively challenged, definitely grossly overpaid director Robin Johnson, I well recall the several days of dysfunction when no one had any critically needed printout or photocopy paper for days because Ms. Johnson had hidden the key to the supply closet. I got that straightened out with some e-mails to former second in command (now working at SBS central office) Biguita Hernandez (who is now apparently afraid to speak up about the racism at Workforce1 in Staten Island).

Client Allen Dawson introduced himself to me by immediately noting my skin color. He is African-American and my complexion is somewhat lighter than his and, although I am Jewish, I am presumably listed on government documents as "white." He then hurled an insult at me that alleged that am one of those people who engage in sexual activity with a female parent. I went to an administrator there (I think at the time it was the then Arbor-employed Biguida Hernandez, who now works for SBS.) She handled the matter firmly and Dawson shut his mouth (and perhaps went on violating agency rules by checking out some pornography on the computer, a regular feature of life at an agency that had rule structure more chaotic than prevailing in parts of Iraq).

Since that time Dawson has on multiple occasions explicitly threatened me with physical violence, accompanying those threats with his racist insults. At Workforce1 he has tended to try to keep his threats to a whisper, sometimes collaborating with a gray-haired African-American woman named Olga Gordon who has a vocabulary something like that of Andrew Dice Clay - except when an administrator is present.

On one occasion, however, Dawson was overheard by a security guard there named Vincent Savoca. Mr. Savoca wrote up the incident and the Arbor Administration (which rivals in integrity the Bush/Cheney Gang) did nothing. The Director there is Robin Johnson, who might be more qualified to coach the New York Jets.

Since Dawson's threats have occurred on multiple occasions both on the premises and on the street (including several times on Bay Street, once on the #51 bus and once on University Place in Greenwich Village) I have made several complaints against him for criminal harassment at the 120th precinct of the NYPD. Although the NYPD should have a thickening file on Allen Dawson, and he should be at least a person of interest at the Hate Crimes Unit, as far as I am aware I have managed to enter two complaints, #'s 6401 and 14981.

Making matters worse and exposing the willful negligence of Arbor's Robin Johnson and Mayor Bloomberg's SBS is the fact that the agency contracts with the Sottile company to provide security at Workforce1. (Mr. Savoca, complaining openly about Sottile's anti-labor relationship with its employees, left for a better security job elsewhere.) Sottile-employed Anthony McCarthy, the guy who has been doing security there since spring of 2008, should probably be sharing a cell at the 120th precinct or perhaps upstate with Dawson. McCarthy, also an African-American, with a strong resemblance to a "you're too bloated" reject from a minor league professional fooball team, is a sadistic character who consistently has protected Allen Dawson. Aside from having made thinly veiled threats against me (wearing his security guard uniform, this whispering psychopath is more subtle than Dawson, who would really be out of place in even the most tolerant Baptist church setting) has brought at least one other client, sitting next to me and not doing anything wrong, to tears by spying on her work-related activity on the computer.

Since McCarthy, in a conversation with a friend of mine, also a client at Workforce1, com- municated a warning of unspecified consequences to me should I return to Workforce1 and backed that threat up by slamming the door in my face on December 6, 2008 and then cov-ering his face perp-walk-style, I have made a complaint against him also (#15659).

Bloomberg's New York City Department of Small Business Services, already the subject of a rather scathing article some months ago in the Village Voice about racism at the central office, in response to my complaints made via Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber ad his aide Nnenna Lynch, asked me for an detailed e-mail. In true Bloomberg Administration Teflon fashion, there has been no response for months. There has been no response from the Mayor himself (who is in receipt of several e-mails from me) either.

Although the NYPD's 120th precinct, which apparently does little in the way of violent crime prevention (the policy, verbalized to me by several officers there is, paraphrased, "We won't even speak to Dawson, etc. about your complaints until he attacks you"), has been of little more than clerical help, I have received important and hopefully continuing assistance at
other NYPD levels especially via Sgt. Al Fiore of the NYPD's Intelligence Division. I won't go into my entire history with Sgt. Fiore here but I first met him when the seriously paranoid NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum - with whom via a family member of mine I've been personally acquainted since 1979, and whose political closet has a number of skeletons, first reported in UP FRONT News - tried to have me arrested at her office some years ago when I was there with a scheduled appointment with her Chief of Staff on the matter of staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters. Sgt. Fiore, who was providing Secret Service-style protection for Gotbaum, handled the situation well. There was no arrest and I think that Sgt. Fiore understands that I am a lot more honest and mentally stable than Betsy Gotbaum.

Sgt. Fiore, who knows something about real and imagined threats, has been very helpful to me as I have been a victim of politically motivated violence involving another racist, in this case Geoffrey Blank, a Jewish man (from Queens) who hates Jews. There is a little about Blank (who embodies presumably the blood of a Jewish person but the mindset of a Nazi, which is why I have labeled him "The Jewzi") in The New York Times and in The Villager and a lot about him in UP FRONT News.

Sgt. Fiore - who along with Rev. Demetrius Carolina, Pastor of the First Central Baptist Church in Staten Island, a largely African-American congregation of which I am a member, and political science professor and progressive activist Steven Gradman, among others, have been helpful to me on a number of very political human rights matters - in fact some months ago paid an unannounced visit to Workforce1 and met for a brief period with Robin Johnson. Based on what Sgt. Fiore told me after the meeting, I am in a position to make a complaint against Ms. Johnson, who is apparently guilty of lying to law enforcement. As I understand her claim, Allen Dawson, Olga Gordon and Anthony McCarthy are blameless and everything is my fault. Moments after Sgt. Fiore left, Dawson emerged from 60 Bay Street and threatened me again. As I took out my cell phone (to call Sgt. Fiore on his way toward the Verrazzano Bridge) Dawson scurried off in the direction of the ferry terminal. Sgt. Fiore did make a U-turn and with me made a brief and unsuccessful search for Dawson in the terminal. As far as Robin Johnson is concerned, if the mega-scammer Bernie Madoff becomes available, Ms. Johnson should consider proposing marriage to him. And if it is a civil ceremony (it might be tough to find a rabbi or pastor to marry these two) perhaps Michael Bloomberg could preside.

As Sgt. Fiore, et. al. are aware, on September 2, 2008 I met with David J. Francis and Raymond V. Wayne, two attorneys for the NYC Commission on Human Rights. No doubt mindful of the fact that a mayoral agency is involved, it took some convincing advocacy by me before they agreed to investigate. The case # is 01038.

At around 7:00 PM on Sunday December 28, 2008 as I was being dropped near my home in the Stapleton section of Staten Island (a few blocks from the church) by some friends, including a Russian-American writer who had read from her recently published book at an "UP FRONT News presents" open mic event I produce in Manhattan, who should pass by but Allen Dawson, heading south on Bay Street. He stopped in his tracks, approached me very menacingly, making the same claim about my late mother and me and twice made explicit threats of physical violence against me. Perhaps noting that I was not alone (one of those there was a hefty Russian-American male) Dawson made no reference to my skin color. When I said, "Good night Dawson!", he backed up. He then again came in my direction and repeated his threat. I repeated, "Good night Dawson" louder and he retreated and hurried down Bay Street.

Allen Dawson is a racist coward and I am quite certain that I would have had to defend my self physically had I been alone.

The first person I called when I got home was Rev. Carolina, whom I called at his residence in New Jersey. Since Rev. Carolina has been aware of the Dawson problem for some time and has offered to help me, it was important for him to know that the matter had become worse and that it appears that Dawson is running wild in part because he is being protected - certainly by Robin Johnson at Workforce1 and by SBS.

When I first brought the Dawson/Workforce1 matter to Rev. Carolina's attention several months ago he and I agreed that, since I am a member of First Central Baptist's Men's Min- istry, I should contact a Men's Ministry officer, that individual being Min. Phillip Price. I did so and at Mr. Price's request send him two detailed e-mails. Other than a rather perfunctory "keep me posted" reply, Mr. Phillips has shown no interest. For some reason on December 14, the date that Michael Bloomberg (who had Rev. Carolina as his dinner guest at the mayor's East 79th Street mansion some months ago) was to speak at FCBC, Mr. Phillips showed some interest in me as he sought me out as I was standing outside the church prior to Bloomberg's arrival. Phillips, who (unlike Rev. Carolina) generally has little to say to me, insisted that I go inside. I was unaware of Mr. Price's status a presumably volunteer security person for the mayor and I reminded him about Dawson and my e-mails. He said something about how "busy" he had been. In my opinion when it comes to human rights Phillip Price needs to at least somewhat reset his priorities.

Another Men's Ministry member I spoke with has been William Hunter. Indeed, when I first mentioned Dawson's name to him, Mr. Hunter, without volunterring any specifics, acknow- ledged a personal awareness of Dawson. Indeed, when I told Mr. Hunter that I had made a complaint against Dawson, he said, "Good." I discussed the matter again with Mr. Hunter at the end of the December 14 Rev. Carolina-led Bible class (we are doing Genesis and Allen Dawson may well be a direct descendant of the serpent) and he again acknowledged knowing Dawson but again offered no more information but asked me to send him an e-mail, which I have (no response). When I asked him who else at FCBC knows Dawson he immediately pointed to FCBC member Henry Dennis, standing next to him and whom I know quite well in part because he is also a client at Workforce1 (where, after he generated some problems there by misusing agency resources, I helped him out). Mr. Dennis in fact has witnessed some of Dawson's harassments against me. Henry Dennis, however seems to subscribe to the well-known "see no evil" code sometimes known as "omerta" (silence). Mr. Dennis immediately began vigorously shaking his head and moved away quickly. A requested e-mail I sent to FCBC member Bernard Jackson has also generated no response.

After speaking for about 15 minutes with Rev. Carolina by phone, I called Ed Josey, the President of the Staten Island branch of the NAACP. I've known Mr. Josey for several years and have consistently supported and written about protests led by him and Rev. Carolina
over abuses against African-Americans, such as what has been described as a police (from the 120th precinct) "abduction" of an alleged Hallowe'en, 2007 egg-throwing black youngster named Shaun Moreno. Mr. Josey has made it clear to me that he considers anti-Semitism to be a matter for NAACP action and he has made that clearer in his e-mailed response to my e-mails to him. Mr. Josey and I are mutually aware that dependence on the 120th precinct needs to be buttressed with a paper trail. I have told him that, other than some e-mails from the NYC Commission on Human Rights and from Rev. Carolina, most of the paper trail is in the form of my e-mails.

I have also discussed the matter with Rabbi Gerald Sussman of the Temple Emanu-El in Port Richmond, who finally did get to meet Rev. Carolina at Bloomberg event at City Hall.
He is of course very aware of the facts of anti-Semitism in Staten Island, the relative absence of protest and the fact that Staten Island's elected political establishment contains no Jews or African-Americans.

On the morning of December 29, since Sgt. Fiore was not working, I called the Office of the NYPD's Chief of Staff and, with some assistance from the NYPD's Office of Strategic Initi-atives, I was telephone-transferred to NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly's office, where I spoke at some length with Detective John Polizzano. I was glad to learn that he is well acquainted with Sgt. Fiore. Det. Polizzano listened carefully to my descriptions of the Dawson/Martin/ McCarthy episodes, the coverups at Arbor and SBS, the help offered by Rev. Carolina, as well as other FCBC-relevant information, including my descriptions of my dealings with the 120th precinct. He has requested an e-mail from me (which he is receiving presently) and he assured me of a response and also that he will start checking out Dawson and my complaints about Dawson, et. al. - which should probably be classified as hate crimes, even in the absence of overt violence, although both Dawson and McCarthy have, without my permission, laid hands on me.

As far as I am aware, while there have been public protests (which I have supported) over racism against black people in Staten Island, there has been little in the way of serious protest in response to a number of anti-Semitic incidents, which include (aside from Dawson) some months ago a swastika daubed on a Bay Terrace synagogue accompanied by a spray-painted "8 8", the numeral "8" representing the eighth letter of the alphabet, "H." The reference is most certainly not to the Dalai Lama of Tibet (his title to Tibetans and many other is "His Holiness"). The "8 8" means "Heil Hitler." The Staten Island Advance and other media also reported some pro-Hitler behavior by some S.I.-based Parks Department employees unaware they were being video-taped.

I don't know if Allen Dawson, who has literally stalked me at times, has a spray-paint container in his pocket. I also don't know if he has ever set foot in the First Central Baptist Church.

As the many readers of UP FRONT News are aware, there are some bizarre fascistic phenomena at work here in New York City. One is in the form of Jew-hating Jews such as Geoffrey Blank. Also fitting that pattern is the "social therapy" cult leader psychotherapist "Dr." Fred Newman.

Probably among the most visible African Jew-haters is the so-called "independent" political activist Lenora Fulani, a political offspring of Fred Newman and a de facto surrogate for the Leesburg, Virginia-based Hitler-wannabe Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. Fulani - who has long-
time allies in Staten Island such as the Independence Party's Sara Lyons - is still trying to live down her claim that the Jews en masse are responsible for the "murders of people of color." Fulani, however, has never turned away from a Jewish person she could politically purchase. That is why, in her capacity as the (since somewhat disempowered) dictator of the so-called Independence Party of New York, Ms. Fulani endorsed Bloomberg for mayor in 2001 and in 2005 (and got Bloomberg-engineered tax breaks for her front organization, "All Stars Project" in return). With Bloomberg-engineered tax breaks such as that and those given to real estate developers, the mayor has no business telling everyone else to tighten our belts.

As I told Rev. Carolina some years ago when I was living in East New York in Brooklyn, I stood by at a local deli on Pitkin Avenue as a young black man ranted to the Arab store staffer about the good works of Adolf Hitler and complained that Hitler hadn't finished the job of annihilating the Jews. (The ranter fortunately either ignored me or perhaps mistook me for an Arab before leaving the store.)

Taking people like Lenora Fulani and that fellow in the deli into consideration, the incon- venient reality of the phenomenon of the "blazi" or "black nazi" comes to mind. It is a partic-ularly perverse phenomenon in light of the historical fact that African-Americans and Jews have been acutely victimized by racism and have historically been civil rights allies.

The fact is, however, that Allen Dawson is a "blazi." With the assistance of law enforcement - and hopefully the community - I am going to protect myself.

Silence is the ally of racism.
* * * * * * *

THE PROBLEM IS NOT THE MARGINALLY QUALIFIED CAROLINE KENNEDY AS U.S. SENATOR. IT IS THE TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED HILLARY CLINTON AS SECRETARY OF STATE.

UP FRONT News December 19, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold.
"http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

By Tom Weiss

The problem is not Caroline Kennedy (although I can think of many people, such as New York City Councilman Tony Avella, political science professor Steven Gradman, and myself, who are more qualified for the U.S. Senate than Ms. Kennedy). The problem is the fact that Hillary Clinton's ascension to the position of Secretary of State is being treated as a "done deal."

Especially taking into account her wandering husband's mega-money ties to financiers, criminals and dictators, Hillary Clinton is a living, breathing conflict of interest. The fact that both Clintons are directly involved in the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet exemplifies the reality of the conflict of interest. The Clintons are a major political voice for the mega-corporate China Lobby, (for which the Stalinist-Maoist Joel Meyers is also a voice).

In fact as readers of UP FRONT News at www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com are aware, I discussed in particular the Tibet Genocide and the Clintons' involvement in the coverup directly with Michelle Obama when she and I met on June 27, 2007 at a campaign event at the Our Children's Foundation in Harlem.

At this point, it appears that the coverup also includes Barack Obama, which raises the question as to what investments he may have in the hedge fund known as the People's Republic of China.

I have been asked by the Executive Editor of The New York Times to send my material on this matter to Dean Baquet, Chief of The Times' Washington Bureau. I spoke by telephone to Mr. Baquet's assistant Ashley, who later e-mailed me an acknowledgement that Baquet had received my correspondence. Hearing nothing in reply UP FRONT News Communications Director Frank De Luca and I called The Times' Washington Bureau and had a chance to talk for several minutes with Mr. Baquet, who, after I described my earlier correspondence with an update, expressed clear interest and asked me to re-send my material.

The Times has an unfortunate history when it comes to reporting on Genocide, having willfully suppressed very credible reports n the 1930's and 1940's about the developing Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Bill Clinton's record (e.g. the Rwanda Genocide) is just as bad.

At this point only one politician has gone on record with me as being ready to investigate all this. That official is New York State Senator Bill Perkins, a major player in the Obama campaign and the man standing right next to me during my June 26, 2007 conversation with Michelle Obama.

Potentially on the spot is U.S. Congressman Jerrold L. Nadler, my former congressman and a reader of UP FRONT News, who knows plenty about the Tibet Genocide. He also knows plenty about Bill Clinton's criminal retaliatory actions against me on January 19, 1993 (the day before Bill Clinton's first inauguration) when he and Warren Christopher had me arrested at the U.S. Capitol when I was there with an invitation to appear at the U.S. Senate Committe on Foreign Relations after Clinton had suppressed the documents I had gotten to him and Christopher via Bill Clinton's secretary Betty M. Currie. I and others have copies of her fax to me acknowledging receipt of my material on Tibet. It was Jerry Nadler whom I called from jail and who presumably helped me get released and presumably helped to obtain for me a very good public defender lawyer, who represented me at the July, 1993 trial where at a jury trial before Judge Satterfield I was acquitted.

I have been in telephone contact with Gov. David Paterson via several high level aides and I expect to be sending him the facts on Hillary Clinton by e-mail very soon. Under any circumstances, assuming that the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations does a rush job and approves Obama's nomination of Mrs. Clinton to be Secretary of State, as the facts about her become known, her tenure may be abbreviated. And then, if Caroline Kennedy is already a U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton will be out of a job. Sort of like Bernie Madoff.
* * * * * * *

THE OBAMA SELLOUT BEGINS. HILLARY CLINTON AND ROBERT RUBIN ARE CORPORATE REPRESENTATIVES AND HOSTILE TO HUMAN RIGHTS.

UP FRONT News December 2, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

THE OBAMA SELLOUT BEGINS. HILLARY CLINTON AND ROBERT RUBIN ARE CORPORATE REPRESENTATIVES AND HOSTILE TO HUMAN RIGHTS.
THE CLINTONS' COVERUP OF THE GENOCIDE IN TIBET AND THEIR ACTIONS
AGAINST ME. MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE VOTED FOR CYNTHIA McKINNEY

By Tom Weiss

During the primary and general elections, there were many progressives who, while fully acknowledging the reality that the Republican Party and its McCain/Palen ticket are reac-tionary to the core, refused to vote for Barack Obama, either in the Democratic primary (where a handful voted for Dennis Kucinich) or in the general election (where a handful voted for Cynthia McKinney and a slightly larger handful voted for Ralph Nader). Those voters as well as the much larger group, while registered to vote, refused to cast ballots.

That population expressed the view that, while Obama and McCain were hardly ideologically identical, the Democrat was nonetheless a little more than a corporate tool, all his populist rhetoric notwithstanding. Nonetheless, in part because of my strong objections to extremist (read Lyndon LaRouche/Lenora Fulani) elements in the Kucinich, Nader and McKinney cam-paigns, and because on certain issues (e.g. labor rights) Obama was more progressive than McCain and because I believed Obama's claims as to his original opposition to the Iraq War, I endorsed Obama in UP FRONT News and, in various public speaking appearances around New York, urged listeners to vote for Obama both in the Democratic primary and in the gen- eral election. Had I gone the "third party" route I would have probably voted for Ms. McKin- ney, whom I have met on several occasions and who supports self-determination for Tibet.

Much of my preference for Obama stemmed directly from my deep political antipathy for Hillary Clinton (as well as for her corrupt and egotistical husband). Monica Lewinsky still
represents (maybe to Bill also) a breath of fresh air. I confess I would probably vote for Hillary Clinton if the alternative for me was to be waterboarded.

In allowing both his arms to be Clinton-twisted into a challah and nominating Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, President-elect Obama has proven that he is in fact a corporate tool and in fact an apologist for genocide - no matter what Mrs. Clinton and he may say about Darfur.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are up to their proverbial political eyeballs in the coverup of the racist Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. As a great many people (including the steadily increasing numbers of UP FRONT News readers in New York and beyond) are aware, it was I who brought the facts of the Genocide in Tibet very directly to Bill Clinton very shortly after he was elected in November, 1992. I got the facts to him and to his absolutely awful mega-corporate choice of Secretary of State Warren Christopher via Betty M. Currie, who office managed the Little Rock-based Clinton Transition Team and served as Bill Clinton's secretary. I have plenty of copies of Ms. Currie's December 11, 1992 fax to me acknowledging receipt the materials I faxed to her at her request during my first long telephone conversation with her from my home telephone at the time, 212-334-9847.

Ms. Currie gave multiple copies of my material to Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher.
They buried everything.

The plot thickened considerably when I received a written invitation from the office of U.S. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D.-N.Y.) to appear at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearings on Bill Clinton's nomination of Christopher to be Secretary of State.
Because of reports that Christopher had been involved in snooping of anti-Viet Nam War activists, the hearing was postponed until January 19, 1993, the day before Bill Clinton's first inauguration.

Within moments of my arrival, with an UP FRONT News assistant, in the Committee reception area at the U.S. Capitol, several U.S. Capitol Police entered the room and arrested me.
With my one (delayed) telephone call, I called my congressman, Jerrold L. Nadler, who already knew me for my free Tibet activism and who was also helping me resist a greedy and politically (Ed Koch)-connected loftlord named Thomas Berger at my then loft home at 190-A Duane Street #5 in the overwhelmingly gentrified neighborhood now known as Tribeca.

I spent the night at what one apparently psychopathic cop laughingly called "the worst jail in the country"; I even refused the possibly toxic bologna sandwich squeezed through the cell bars.

I was released the next day (as Bill Clinton was being inaugurated) and met my public de- fender attorney (whose name I do not recall at this time), an African-American woman with an Angela Davis hairstyle who, as a civil rights specialist, had asked for my case. After my meeting with her I returned to New York.

Some days later the attorney called me and advised me that the Clinton Administration was offering me some kind of plea deal if I agreed to take responsibility for me arrest. Since it was Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher, et. al., who broke the law and violated my civil rights, I said, paraphrased, "No way!."

At a jury trial before Judge Satterfield the following July, I was acquitted. A reporter then ap- proached me and asked me if I knew the large Frankenstein-resembling man observing the trial. I told him that I did not know the man. The reporter told me that he was the #3 man in the State Department.

My free Tibet activities continued and Bill Clinton continued his Tibet Genocide coverup and his perhaps somewhat understandable womanizing.

After Chicago/Little Rock/Chappaqua transplant Hillary Clinton carpetbagged her way into becoming a U.S. Senator, and apparently before she became acquainted with my Tibet dealings with her husband (who over the years has kept many secrets from his wife), she assisted me on one occasion with a Social Security-related problem. Indeed, she sent me as I recall two personal letters assuring me that I could always count on her for assistance.

That turned out to be nothing more than another Clinton lie. In fact, when, while I was home-less and had been robbed, I had a similar Social Security-related emergency, Mrs. Clinton refused to help. In fact, she had an aide, the politically connected (Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV) Yajaria Yepez, send a defamatory and threatening e-mail about me on September 5, 2003 to my evidently easily intimidated younger brother Jim in upstate New York. I and others have copies.

Senator Clinton also had an "investigator" named "Mr. Zimmerman" - who told me that Mrs. Clinton had personally instructed him to speak to me on the phone - verbalize an explicit threat against me after revealing that Mrs. Clinton had me under surveillance. (A paranoid person as Secretary of State?)

Any vetting of Mrs. Clinton and her husband has to include a thorough investigation of all this by law enforcement, including the NYPD and presumably the FBI. I am making certain that law enforcement has all the facts regarding criminal behavior involving Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Unless Barack Obama had picked perhaps Sarah Palin or Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of State, it is hard to see how he could have made a worse choice.

The Clintons are both proven liars. As I have said and written previously, they not only lie to
Americans and to the rest of the world, they lie to each other.

John McCain repeatedly said that Barack Obama is not ready to be president. Taking into consideration the nomination of Hillary Clinton and the inner circle status of corporate power
players such as former (Bill Clinton) Treausury Secretary Robert Rubin (whose "welfare reform" ripped up the safety net and worsenened the homelessness crisis) McCain's assessment appears to have been correct.

Barack Obama needs to have a conversation about me with his wife Michelle, who should have little difficulty in remembering my Tibet and Hillary Clinton-related conversation with her at the Our Children's Foundation in Harlem on June 26, 2007 with major Obama supporter State Senator Bill Perkins (D.-Manh.) standing right next to me. Mrs. Obama listened to my perhaps three minute account, accepted my articles (including some on my write-in candidacy for the U.S. Senate against Mrs. Clinton, http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/, and assured me that she would give them to her husband.

I have received some e-mails from African-American groups opposing Mrs. Clinton as Sec- retary of State. Following his receipt from me of a copy of my UP FRONT News article head- lined "Hillary Clinton Is Unfit to Be Secretary of State. The Clintons' Involvement in the Coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. The Clintons' Retaliations Against Me. My Tibet Conversation with Michelle Obama. The Tibet Genocide Is Racist. Time for Congressman Nadler to Tell the Facts to Obama" and a copy of my e-mail to Obama Transition Team Co-chair John Podesta and colleagues, Senator Perkins replied to me with an assurace that he will "look into this."

I live in Staten Island, where the number of UP FRONT News readers is increasing daily. That is a very good thing politically because until recently there has been something of a de facto media monopoly occupied by the very politically tightly controlled Staten Island Advance. The political editor at that paper is Tom Wrobleski, who sat on the story of my U.S. Senate candidacy against Hillary Clinton for months (and then got scooped by Newsday), and who sees his role as protecting the political establishment, regardless of party. Wrobleski once told one of my UP FRONT News representatives that he did not "care" what I said about the Genocide in Tibet and Hillary Clinton. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton will consider the taciturn Wrobleski (who covered up for the belatedly disgraced Vito Fossella for years until the "family values" Staten Island
Congressman was arrested on a DUI in Virginia as he was swerving to his lover's house) to be one of her press aides, wherever she winds up.

Much of Staten Island is ruled by a Hillary Clinton-run political machine consisting of a
lily-white group of politicians including State Assemblyman Matthew Titone, State Senator Diane Savino, outgoing City Councilman and Clintonite Michael McMahon and the increasingly machine-docile Assemblywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer. Now that Mr. McMahon has been "elected" to the congress in a NYC Board of Elections-mismanaged election (I ran as a write-in candidate and, when it comes to write-in procedures and practices, the NYCBOE is apparently in violation of federally guaranteed voting rights) there is much competition to fill his City Council seat. I am acquainted with two African-American candidates: College of Staten Island teacher and activist Debi Rose, and Rev. Tony Baker, Pastor of the St. Phillips Baptist Church. Since the City Council addresses international issues, including Tibet - the major Free Tibet voice there is Councilman Tony Avella, (D.-Queens) - their views on the Tibet Genocide Coverup/Clinton matter are important. Ms. Rose has let me know that she is not happy about Obama's choice of Mrs. Clinton to be Secretary of State. Rev. Baker - who is disturbingly close to the aforementioned S.I. political machine, especially the ethically challenged and seriously negligent Titone and Titone's political mother superior City Council Speaker Christine Quinn - has been silent as far as I am aware.

State Senator Perkins, after receiving an e-mailed copy of my UP FRONT News article
"Hillary Clinton Is Unfit to Be Secretary of State. The Clintons' Direct Involvement in the Coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. The Clintons' Retaliations Against Me. The Tibet Genocide Is Racist. Time for Congressman nadler to Tell the Facts to Obama" and a copy of my e-mail to Obama Transition Team Co-chairperson John Podesta and his colleagues, thanked me in his reply and assured me that he "will look into this."

Aside from myself, the most outspoken and politically potent voice on the Tibet issue in Staten Island has been Rev. Demetrius Carolina, Pastor of the also steadily increasing in size First Central Baptist Church, of which I am a member. Rev. Carolina, who is also a college political science teacher and a regular UP FRONT News reader, is one of the relatively few African-Americans to denounce Communist China for the Genocide in Tibet.

Hillary Clinton has reportedly expressed an interest in speaking at First Central. I hope that
any Clinton appearance at the church will happen after she no longer holds any political office and after she comes clean about Tibet - and about me.

I think perhaps Councilman Avella and/or Senator Perkins would be better choices.
In any event, Hillary Clinton is a corporation-loyal enemy of human rights (including mine), an apologist for genocide and is fundamentally unqualified to be Secretary of State.
* * * * * * *

STRENGTHENING TENANTS RIGHTS IN NEW YORK. RESURRECT "FLYNN-DEARIE."

UP FRONT News December 11, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

STRENGTHENING TENANTS RIGHTS IN NEW YORK. RESURRECT "FLYNN-DEARIE."
RENT "STABLIZATION" IS A LOOPHOLE-RIDDLED SHAM. REQUIRE OWNERS TO
OPEN THEIR BOOKS, END VACANCY DECONTROL AND "OWNER OCCUPANCY"
DISPLACEMENT. AND (POLITICALLY) DISPLACE MIKE McKEE.

By Tom Weiss

Thanks to the power of the real estate lobby in all the major political parties in New York, rent protection laws are inadequate, a major contributing factor in the steadily worsening affordable housing crisis and the related metastasis of homelessness. The fact is that, particularly in New York City, the citizens here lose what we most need and in fact get what we least need. i.e. luxury housing and obscenely overpaid athletes. The real estate section of the Sunday New York Times and the sports pages of any newspaper are proof positive of that reality. There is little likelihood that newly signed pitcher C.C. Sabathia or his narcissistic Madonna/Kabbalah-entranced teammate, Alex Rodriguez (over $26 million a "year" for a part-time job), paid by the taxpayer-subsidized outfit known as the New York Yankees will wind up on a waiting list for Section 8 housing.

That is part of the political and economic context generating the well attended tenants rights rally on December 9 at the Ethical Culture Center in a very wealthy section of Manhattan. The rally focused in the imminent battle in the New York State legislature to eliminate "vacancy decontrol", whereby a rent-stabilized apartment that reaches $2,000/month can go much. much, much higher.

The fact that a rent stabilized apartment can be leased lawfully at $2,000/month shows what is wrong with the existing loophole-ridden rent "protection" system in New York in the first place. Rent "stabilization" is a sham. It is a sham because it is based on a system under which landlords, in demanding periodic rent increases before the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, are allowed to plead poverty while keeping their books closed.

In fact landlords (not all, but many) have been known to cook their books as if they were were among the world's finest chefs. I know from my experience in the last millennium with Thomas Berger, one of the greediest, most politically connected landlords since the Old Testament and the owner of a loft building at 190-A Duane Street in Tribeca (the mega-gen-trified neighborhood I call DeNirostan) where I lived from 1977 until 1993 (5 1/2 of those years without heat and water thanks to the avaricious Ed Koch pal Berger, a resident of Forest Hills, Queens). Indeed under the euphemism known as rent stabilization, Berger ripped off a rent increase of over almost 400% approved by the landlord-tilted NYC Loft Board.

Among the people most responsible for the Swiss cheese "stablization" laws under which massive gentrification and displacement have taken place, aside from the overt and well or- ganized real estate lobby have been self-appointed "tenants rights leaders" such as Mike ("The Knife") McKee and his pal in the loft Chuck ("Ol' Loophole") Delaney.

It was McKee and Delaney who quietly conspired in 1980 with in particular "liberal" Demo- cratic legislators who took campaign cash from the real estate lobby to insert a provision into the Loft Law allowing landlords to pass along "legalization" costs as rent increases. And when I traveled to Albany to try to prevent that, they arranged with a seriously mentally unstable legislative aide to former State Assemblyman Paul Viggiano (D.-Manh.) have me arrested in the Legislative Office Building. No kidding! The result was a Loft Law so loophole-riddled that it resulted in the wholesale luxurization of loft districts such as SoHo, NoHo, TriBeCa and DUMBO under rent "stabilization." As far as I am aware, among the relatively few protected loft tenants has been Delaney, who lives in a financial district Pearl Street building from which another loft tenant suddenly and mysteriously disappeared - forever.

As far as I am aware the only bill ever introduced into the New York state legislature that would have properly protected tenants was the reccurently buried in the last millennium Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act. The key provision of that bill was that it required any owner of a multiple dwelling seeking a rent increase to prove need by opening his or her books for auditing by the state. That provision of course was anathema to the landlords and their friends. Among those friends were - and are - Mike McKee and Chuck Delaney.

Among the organizations supporting Flynn-Dearie was the Metropolitan Council on Housing, then led by activists such as Jane Benedict and Esther Rand. Mike Mckee split the tenants movement by creating the New York Neighborhood and Tenants Coalition and opposed
Flynn-Dearie, claiming that the "open the books" provision was "too cumbersome."

In fact, since the "Flynn" in Flynn-Dearie was State Senator John Flynn, a conservative but tenant-sensitive Republican legislator from Yonkers, the Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act, unlike other tenant bills, could have passed. John Dearie was a Democratic State Assemblyman from the Parkchester area of the Bronx. Had Flynn-Dearie become law, gentrification would have been essentially stopped, while landlords actually in need of rent increases would have been protected.

Mike McKee, who will not talk about his reported ties to the right-wing Manhattan Institute, is to an important degree responsible for a great many displacements.

Mike McKee and Chuck Delaney are what are known as fifth columnists, i.e. reactionary infiltrators camouflaged as populists. (The term was originally applied to politically well-camouflaged pseudo-leftists collaborating with Francisco Franco before and during the Spanish Civil War.)

The last time I saw McKee as a speaker spouting his militant populist rhetoric was in April, 2007 at a rally in front of 47 East 3rd Street in Manhattan in support of the tenants of that building being displaced by the landlord Economakis family by means of "owner occupancy." Evictions of rent-protected tenants in this way are, as the courts have ruled, "legal." Why? Because of a loophole in the rent stabilization laws. The notion of McKee speaking at such a rally was analagous to perhaps Dick Cheney addressing a Quaker meeting and so I used my First Amendment rights to somewhat spontaneously educate the public as McKee slunk off to the rear of the rally with his baseball cap pulled halfway over his eyes "perp-walk"-style. A more sincere speech on that day was delivered by East Village activist and Ben Shaoul tenant Monte Schapiro.

The December 9 rally at the Ethical Culture center was addressed by several state legislators, most vociferously by State Senator Tom Duane (D.-Manh.), who pledged that vacancy decontrol will be ended in the upcoming legislative session. As far as I am concerned, while that would be a step in the right direction, the chronic problems afflicting tenants will remain until a Flynn-Dearie-type law requiring landlords to open their books and closing the owner occupancy loophole is enacted.

I've spoken to several legislators, including Assemblymembers Linda Rosenthal (D.-Manh.), Brian Kavanagh (D.-Manh.) and State Senator Andrew Lanza (R.-S.I.) about this. All three have expressed support for the Flynn-Dearie "open the books" concept. What a politician says, however, means little until something is put into writing (at least to me), something that Rosenthal, Kavanagh, and Lanza have not yet done. (I hope they're not worried about the politically receding Mike McKee, who has been the subject of puff coverage in the mainstream media but has been more thoroughly covered in UP FRONT News.)

As a resident of the very gentrification and highrise-threatened working class community of Stapleton on Staten Island's North Shore, which the developers would like to "upscale" into another Lower Manhattan (with little in the way of real resistance from the elected officials and the City Council candidate wannabes) as far as I was able to tell, there were relatively
few Staten Islanders at the December 9 rally. One sponsoring group, Make the Road New York, has offices in Queens, Brooklyn and S.I.

Mike McKee, in his tenants rights uniform, may still try to confuse people with his uncon-vincing impersonations of Che Guevara but at Ethical Culture he wisely did not appear on the speakers' platform. Also absent was McKee pal, the recurrently tenants rights spouting New York City Council Speaker Christine ("The Flighty") Quinn, who has been known to accept much campaign cash from the real estate lobby.
* * * * * * *

WHY IS THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE PROTECTING LYNDON LAROUCHE?

UP FRONT News December 5, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

By Tom Weiss

Quite a number of years ago, there was a large story in the Columbia Journalism Review reporting the details of how very well politically camouflaged agents of the mega-fascist
megalomaniac cult leader Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. had becoming embedded at the highest levels of NBC News. When discovered, they were summarily dismissed. Also some years ago, when it was discovered that two "Democrats" (LaRouche is a registered Democrat) elected to two of the top three statewide offices in Illinois were camouflaged LaRoucheites, that became a big headlined front page story in The New York Times and elsewhere.

New Hampshire born and Massachusetts raised LaRouche, a convicted felon with long ties to the ultra-left (e.g.Maoists) and the ultra-right (KKK), started out as a very socially malad-
justed leftist with ties to both Stalinists and Trotskyites. In his strategy of achieving what he refers to as "hegemony over the left" LaRouche's agents sowed factional dissension which often involved violence, as his people infiltrated CPUSA meetings and, at the appointed moments pulled clubs out of their pants legs (a la Geoffrey Blank pal and St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church "9/11 Truth" hanger-on Karl Rosenstein) and pummeled the Reds. He called it "Operation Mop-up."

In the 1970's LaRouche became very well known as "Lyn Marcus", a "marxist" faculty member at City College, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was while at City College he met and began to collaborate with a faculty colleague, Fred Newman. It was "psychotherapist" Newman who created the sex-with-your-therapist cult known as "social therapy" and who politically spawned the African-American racist Lenora Fulani and their pseudo-left New Alliance Party.

As far as I am aware, the first journalist to expose this hoax was me. Based on information provided by me to then Village Voice journalist Joe Conason (now with the New York Observer) the Voice did a story on the NAP in 1981 (without acknowledging that the story was first reported in UP FRONT News).

As is chronicled by investigative reporter Dennis King in his very unauthorized biography of LaRouche "The New American Fascism", LaRouche played an important behind the scenes violence-encouraging role in the Columbia University anti-Viet Nam War Mark Rudd "led" demonstrations in the 1960's.

Although the kleptomanaical LaRouche got convicted in the 1980's for credit card and mail fraud in a front page trial in Boston and did about seven years in federal penitentiaries in Massachusetts and Minnesota, he never gave up his dreams of total power. LaRouche, a worshiper of things German (who created the teutonic Schiller Institute, which has spawned ideologues like "9/11 Truth" favorite Webster Tarpley) fully believes that only he is fit to rule and leads a cult of followers who slavishly regard him as a god. He developed a violent brainwashing technique known as "ego stripping."

LaRouche has for decades made major use of the Mussolini and Hitler tactic known as the "fifth column", which involves agents camouflaging themselves in leftist disguise, often in populist Lenora Fulani Geoffrey Blank-style rhetoric. It invariably involves outlefting the small "d" democratic left. The populism and Black Power-spouting New Alliance Party was a classic LaRouche fifth column operation.

Mussolini and Hitler (Hitler, remember, called himself a "socialist") first applied the fifth col- umn tactic internationally in Spain before and during the Spanish Civil war by infiltrating the large and politically diverse Spanish left (Communists, Socialists, and many anarchists) causing major factionalization and ultimately contributing to Francisco Franco's victory.

In recent years LaRouche has been actively fifth columning his way into the left via embedding his people in the peace movement and the Green Party. Key operatives, all loyal to Lenora Fulani (who won't talk about LaRouche), include outwardly articulate and recurrently rational frauds such as Paul ("Zool") Zulkowitz, who got himself deeply embedded in the peace movement, the Ralph Nader for president campaigns, and with the extraordinarily politically gullible peace mom Cindy Sheehan. Zulkowitz was exposed in UP FRONT News for his 2005 "Camp Casey" hoax in Union Square in Manhattan, in which he attempted to precipitate the arrest of an unknowing Cindy Sheehan and in fact staged his own arrest, (which led to my arrest), a classic LaRouche ploy recurrently used by his pal the violent and psychopathic Geoffrey Blank, the deposed self-appointed dictator of the No Police State Coalitiion and the Saddam Hussein of Union Square. Other such Green crypto-fascists include the violent George Tatevosyan (who in April, 2004 physically assaulted me to prevent my attending a Ralph Nader news conference in Manhattan) and buddy Gerald Kann (twice a Long Island City, Queens resident and twice Green Party candidate for the City Council).

The LaRouche split-the-left-strategy was played out to politically lethal effect in 2000 when the Nader candidacy helped to elect Cheney/Bush. Nader is apparently a slow learner as he ran again in 2004 and 2008, each time drawing fewer votes. UP FRONT News, noting that the excremental Kann served as Nader's voice in New York, vigorously opposed Nader's candidacies.
LaRouche fifth columnists such as in particular Les ("Less") Jamieson took dictatorial control of the St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church in Manhattan-based "9/11 Truth" group, co-led by a very dubious populism-spouting Episcopalian "pastor"-squatter named "Father" Frank Morales and threatened people such as myself who asked questions about La Rouche ties. One young "9/11 Truth" participant named Dan Wallace, who had witnessed Jamieson/Morales harassments of me, wound up prematurely dead in his bed in Queens a couple of weeks after he had done a video-interview with me. on the LaRouche/"9/11 Truth." Jamieson, also connected to a "Christian" cult calling itself Urantia, is as tightlipped about all this as Dick Cheney habitually is about just about anything.

LaRouche has been known to deal lethally with followers who go astray. Google "Jeremiah Duggan", who died suddenly in Europe not too long after separating from LaRouche's Schiller Institute.

The LaRouche infiltration gets little mention in the established media here. In fact the reality of the LaRouche infiltration is knowinglly suppressed in the mainstream media. LaRouche-ite Geoffrey Blank regularly got air-time on WBAI as well as recurrently fawning coverage in the Villager, a newspaper with a "populist" bent also known for some censorship (certainly in its coverage of the UP FRONT News-exposed and now thoroughly discredited Blank).

The absence of mainstream media coverage (although Florida-based Vyzygoth's "Grassy Knoll" and the California-based "Ministry of Truth" internet talk shows have had me on their programs) suggests to me that LaRouche (who survives by his "inside-outside" tactics that involve camouflage) in fact has his agents in the mainstream media who willfully slant and censor the news.

One of the most politically censored newspapers anywhere is the billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance, the corporate and political establishment-protecting
daily whose political editor is the dour Tom Wrobleski. I live in Staten Island and, as a journalist and political activist, I have been fighting Staten Island Advance political censorhip for several years. For example Wrobleski sat on the story of my candidacy for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton for months until he had no choice other than to report it when he allowed the Advance to get scooped by Newsday on August 26, 2005.

Wrobleski is perhaps the only journalist anywhere to actually report a genocide (Tibet, because of my information) and then not follow it up. One reason he suppresses that heavy story is because he is in the business of protecting the entire political establishment in Staten Island, which is controlled by a Westchester County resident named Hillary Clinton. In fact Bill and Hillary Clinton are directly involved in the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. Indeed, while I was running as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Congress in 2008 Wrobleski told my campaign Communications Director Frank De Luca that he didn't "care" what I said about Tibet and Hillary Clinton. As I have said, Tom Wrobleski should be the bureau chief at the Staten Island Advance's hypothetical Beijing bureau.

One of the those running in the recent congressional race was Carmine Morano, the candidate of the Independence Party of New York. The IPNY was created some years ago by none other than Lenora Fulani, who set herself up as its dictator. Using her considerable camouflage and populist rhetorical skills and her appeal to "third party" sentiment among voters unhappy with the "choices" offered by the Democrats and Republicans, Fulani helped the IPNY become the third largest party in New York State. In that capacity she twice endorsed Michael Bloomberg, who would not have been elected mayor on 2001 had it not been for the votes he got on the IPNY ballot line.

Fulani got herself into big trouble with others in the IPNY and elsewhere because of her irrepressible distaste for Jewish people, which parallels that of her mentors, the Jewish
Newman and the non-Jewish LaRouche. Fulani is on record as describing the Jews en masse as "the murderers of people of color." Newman once labeled Jews as "the stormtroopers of decadent capitalism." Fulani's anti-Jewish outbursts got her disempowered somewhat in the IPNY but she remains an active member with her loyalists such as lawyer Harry Kresky in key official positions in the IPNY. After defending her comments for years, Fulani, aware that she was politically sinking in a city with lots of Jewish people, apologized - a very belated and I am certain insincere surface epiphany.

One of Fulani's long time political allies is IPNY official Sara Lyons, of Staten Island. I don't know if Ms. Lyons has ever met Lyndon LaRouche, who lives in Hitler-style near isolation with his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a large estate in Loudoun County (Leesburg), Va.
As far as I am concerned, Fulani/Lyons & Co. are at the very least the voice (and perhaps money) of Lyndon LaRouche in Staten Island.

Tom Wrobleski has occasionally reported on the IPNY and indeed has mentioned the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Fulani. It's not easy to cover up a story reported by other media; indeed the New York Post has done some thorough coverage of the nefarious Fulani. (Wrobleski for years protected the machination-practicing Congressman Vito Fossella, some of whose corrupt behavior was reported in other New York media. In fact it was the Virginia police that broke the story of Fossella's May 1, 2008 DUI arrest and the fact of his adulterous child-producing affair with his lover in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. And now, if Fossella narcissistically fantasizes about a political comeback, Wrobleski is right there to report it.)

I have made Tom Wrobleski fully aware of the Fulani/LaRouche link and of its relationship to for example the Carmine Morano candidacy. Indeed I made it a campaign issue in an article at www.tomweissdforuscongress.blogspot.com. Not a syllable about that in the Staten Island Advance.

I don't know if media mogul Donald Newhouse or his employee Tom Wrobleski have ever met Lyndon LaRouche. But why are they protecting him?
* * * * * * *

HILLARY CLINTON IS UNFIT TO BE SECRETARY OF STATE.

UP FRONT News November 22, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

HILLARY CLINTON IS UNFIT TO BE SECRETARY OF STATE. THE CLINTONS' DIRECT INVOLVEMENT IN THE COVERUP OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST GENOCIDE IN TIBET. THE CLINTONS' RETALIATIONS AGAINST ME. MY TIBET CONVERSATION WITH MICHELLE OBAMA. THE TIBET GENOCIDE IS RACIST. TIME FOR CONGRESSMAN NADLER TO TELL THE FACTS TO OBAMA. CHINA-DOLL HILLARY CLINTON IS CHUMP "CHANGE."

By Tom Weiss

In 2005 when I decided to run for the U.S. Senate against the Republicrat Hillary Clinton, among the first people I discussed my decision with was the very progressive Steven Gradman, a political science professor and at the time organizer of the John Edwards meetup in New York City. When I told him of my serious plans to run against Mrs. Clinton, whom I consider to be a dishonest power-and-wealth-obsessed Machiavellian politician with little regard for human rights and who is a de facto apologist for genocide, Professor Gradman smiled and said, "Oh, she's not so bad." And I set out to prove to him that she was and is "so bad." In any event, while Professor Gradman and I may have some issue differences of degree, he did agree to be the volunteer Media Coordinator for my write-in campaign.
(See www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com). He has since been one of my political advisors.

When I recently told him that I am actively opposing Hillary Clinton as a possible Secretary of State and my reasons (as an enemy of human rights with a primary loyalty to profiteering corporations which feed off human deprivation and genocide, e.g. in "Communist" China-occupied Tibet, and as someone who has major problems in telling the truth, e.g. "sniper fire" in the Balkans, she is not qualified to represent the U.S., Professor Gradman again seemed to give her the benefit of his obvious doubts. (Why would he have been for Edwards and then after Edwards dropped out, vigorously for Obama? And for me.) As I personally told Michelle Obama on June 26, 2007 at the Our Children's Foundation in Harlem when she and I met on an unscheduled basis for several minutes, there is a racist Genocide continuing in Tibet and that Bill and Hillary Clinton are directly involved in a cover-up of that Genocide. In the few minutes I had with Ms. Obama, with State Senator Bill Perkins (D-Manh.) standing right next to me, I made brief mention of some genocide statistics (e.g. the 1 million Tibetans dead as a result of the occupation) and the fact of my conversations and fax communications in late 1992 and early 1993 with Bill Clinton's secretary Betty M. Currie, who managed the Transition Office in Little Rock at the time. It was Ms. Currie who asked me to send her my material, which she fax-acknowledged to me on December 11, 1992, and who gave my material personally to Bill Clinton and post-Clinton election Transition Chief and imminent Secretary of State Warren Christopher several times. They buried it.

And then when I was officially invited by U.S. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan to appear at the January 19, 1993 hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the nomination of Christopher as Secretary of State (which I was opposing in my prepared testimony), Clinton and Christopher arranged to have me arrested in the Committee reception area at the U.S. Capitol. They did not arrest my UP FRONT News assistant.

With my one telephone call from the D.C. Central Block jail, I called my congressman, U.S. Representative Jerrold L. Nadler. At the time I was a loft tenant in Tribeca and Mr. Nadler was doing his apparent best to help me against one of the greediest landlords "since the Book of Genesis", the outwardly devout Ed Koch pal Thomas Berger. Mr. Nadler, a strong pro-Tibet voice in the Congress, was well aware of my Free-Tibet activism and was acquainted with UP FRONT News. Indeed, some years previously I had represented Mr. Nadler at one of the annual March 10 Free Tibet demonstrations.

I spent the night in what one of the obviously psychologically impaired U.S. Capitol cops laughingly referred to as "the worst jail in the country" (as I recall I went hungry rather than eating the bologna sandwich squeezed through the cell bars). The next morning, Inauguration Day, I met my lawyer, an African-American woman with an Angela Davis-style afro, who was looking for me. She said that she was a public defender and that she specialized in constitutional rights. I am unable to recall her name years later but she did a very good job of representing me against the Bill Clinton Administration.

I was released just as Bill Clinton was being inaugurated and, after a meeting with my lawyer, returned to New York. A few days later my lawyer called me and told me that the Clinton Administration was offering me a plea bargain if I agreed to take the blame for being arrested. Since I was behaving lawfully and since Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher, et. al. were breaking the law, I refused.

At a jury trial before Judge Satterfield in July, 1993 I was acquitted. A reporter there told me that the Frankenstein-sized robotic-appearing guy in the courtroom was the #3 man in Christopher's State Department. He must have left unhappy.

Subsequently, as U.S. Senator, Mrs. Clinton, presumably not yet aware of my Tibet work, on one occasion assisted me with an emergency Social Security-related problem and then sent me two signed letters assuring me that I could count on her anytime for assistance. She lied.

I continued with my very visible Free Tibet work, writing many articles in UP FRONT News, which is widely read by Tibetans (presumably including the Dalai Lama, whom I have met on several occasions) and throughout the political community in New York and beyond. My efforts vis a vis Tibet and other issues (e.g. blowing the whistle on the coverup of budget cut-caused patient deaths at City-operated Queens Hospital Center in 1977-78, tenants rights, as producer of performing arts events, etc.) have been covered in other print and broadcast media (e.g. Newsday, The New York Times, the Daily News. New York Post, Queens Tribune, Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, Downtown Express, Downtown Magazine, WBAI, and some college and internet media, et. al.)

And so, once Hillary Clinton became aware of my Tibet work in particular, she broke her promise of assistance. When in 2003, while I was homeless, a process initiated by the avaricious Thomas Berger, I ran into an emergency Social Security-related situation. Not only did Mrs. Clinton, presumably in violation of her mandated responsibilties as my Senator, refuse to assist me, she came at me with defamation and several threats, one in the from of a September 5, 2003 e-mail from a very politically connected (Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV) staffer named Yajaira Yepez to my apparently easily politically intimidated younger brother Jim in very rural upstate New York.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have made planeloads of money in China, are directly involved in the coverup of what may be the world's longest running genocide by occupation, in Tibet. I refer to it as both "The Quiet Genocide" and "The Himalayan Holocaust." And, like in the 1930's as Adolf Hitler was developing his efforts at killing all the Jews, the media has kept largely silent. (The Nazi-related silience generated a very belated apology from New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.)

I live in Staten Island, home to what may be the most politically censored newspaper in New York, the billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance. Political reporting at the Advance is tightly controlled by an apparently human rights-ignorant political editor named Tom Wrobleski, who is essentially a mouthpiece for the political-corporate establishment. When I ran for the U.S. Senate aganst Mrs. Clinton, Wrobleski sat on the story for
months and then allowed his paper to get scooped by Newsday's Dan Janison, which on August 26, 2005 reported the related story of my acquaintance NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum's televised paranoid fantasies about being "stalked" by me. The Advance, via Wrobleski, badly misreported the whole thing on August 27, leaving out quotation marks, reporting falsehoods as facts, etc., in order to protect Gotbaum, Clinton and the political establishment in machine-controlled Staten Island. The Daily News (mentioning my "Free Tibet" t-shirt) and The New York Times, also reported that story on August 27 far more accurately than Wrobleski.

After I very publicly accused Wrobleski (labeling him "Wrongleski") of censorship and slanted reporting, he was directed to write a story on my Senate campaign which appeared on the front page of the Advance on August 21, 2006. He spent most of the article writing about the technicalities of write-in voting and near the end mentioned my claim that Mrs. Clinton had ignored my reports on the Genocide in Tibet. Since that time, not a syllable about Tibet. Indeed during my recent write-in campaign for the U.S. Congress my campaign Communications Coordinator Frank De Luca told me that, during a long telephone conversation he had with Wrobleski, the Advance man told him that he didn't "care" what I said about Tibet and Hillary Clinton. Wrobleski should be heading Donald Newhouse's Beijing Bureau.

Unless Barack Obama in an act of compassion is secretly considering nominating purported Russia specialist Sarah Palin to be Secretary of State, I cannot imagne a worse choice than Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy, a reality that has been convincingly demonstrated on multiple occasions, the "sniper fire" episode being a case in point. In fact her husband is at least as untrustworthy. The Clintons not only lie to the American people but, as the Monica Lewinsky (and perhaps the very unsolved Vincent Foster "sui-cide" case) make clear, they lie to each other. As Hollywood mogul David Geffen once put it, "[The Clintons] lie with such ease."

Lying in international relations can have the most devastating consequences. Lying precipitates wars, Adolf Hitler and his "Big Lie" and Cheney/Bush's "weapons of mass destruction" being cases in point.

The U.S., theoretically still a beacon of freedom to billions (although 16 years of Clinton/ Bush have diminished America substantially in the eyes of the world's people, thereby feeding the fires of hatred and terrorism), should not be represented by a corporation-loyal power addict with an ingrained aversion for the truth and who has little regard for human rights.

And no matter how polite the Dalai Lama chooses to be (his overly conciliatory pronoucements regarding mythical "autonomy" for Tibet and with regard to the widely protested Beijing Olympics have angered more than a few Tibetans, who certainly regard His Holiness as their political and spiritual leader, but recognize, as does the Dalai Lama himself, that he is not infallible) Tibetans have every reason to regard the China-doll Hillary Clinton as bad news.

I am glad to see the rising opposition to Clinton as Secretary of State among in particular progressive African-Americans, most of whom pretty much understandably shut out Ralph Nader and gave negligible support to former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (both Nader and McKinney, as reported pretty much exlusively in UP FRONT News, are tarred with the Green Party and "independent" Lenora Fulani/Lyndon LaRouche crypto-fascist split-the-left brush) and supported Barack Obama (as did I).

Many African-Americans, however, remain at best marginally aware of the racist nature of the Chinese Communist occupation of Tibet. Tibetans are a relatively dark-complexioned people, ethnically distinct from the light-complexioned Chinese. I have learned from a very reliable source, who is a close friend of the Dalai Lama, that the Tibetan language is a derivative of Aramaic, and that the Hebrew factor is part of the evidence suggesting that Jesus, during His approximately 18 year absence from the Bible, spent some major time in what it now Tibet. That may well explain at least some of the spiritual mystique about the Dalai Lama successions as well as the reality that, while there are presumably some sinful Tibetans, Tibet is perhaps the only pacifist "nation" on earth.

Among the African-American civil rights leaders who have spoken out on Tibet are two of my friends, both readers of UP FRONT News. They are Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell, a close associate of Martin Luther King and the now retired pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Flushing, Queens, and Rev. Demetrius Carolina, the not at all retired pastor of the First Central Baptist Church in Staten Island. It was in 1992 and 1993 that I gave Rev. Mitchell lots of information about Tibet. And it was in an article about Rev. Mitchell I wrote for the (no longer published) Downtown Magazine that he declared the Communist Chinese to be guilty of "genocide"in Tibet. UP FRONT News reader Rev. Carolina and I have talked about Tibet on several occasions. He made it a point at a Sunday service before the usual full house to denounce the Chinese Communists for perpetrating "genocide" in Tibet.

Perhaps the most outspoken and legislatively concrete politician on this issue at least recently has been New York City Councilman Tony Avella (D.-Queens), a strong human and animal rights advocate, who has stood up to the Clinton-attached Mayor Michael Bloomberg/City Council Speaker Christine Quinn regime on many issues, including Sonny Carson, a morally unjustifiable salary increase for City Councilmembers and a number of Bloomberg aides, tenants rights/gentrification/overdevelopment, and the third term Roman Emperor complex.

At my initiative, in coordination with a Free Tibet group, Mr. Avella earlier this year introduced Resolution #1299, which cited the Genocide in Tibet and called for the removal of the 2008 Olympic Games from Beijing. That resolution as expected was buried by Clinton indentured servant Quinn.

Although Tony Avella is going for politically higher ground as a candidate for Mayor, and is presumably not a candidate for Secretary of State, there is no question in mind that, from the standpoint of human rights and integrity, he is far more qualified than Hillary Clinton.

Other politicians (all UP FRONT News-knowledgeable) who have spoken out on Tibet include the aforementioned Jerrold Nadler (who had to swallow very hard in order to perfunctorily at the outset "support" Mrs. Clinton in her abrasive and revealing campaign for the presidency), U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner (D.-Queens/Brooklyn), also a candidate for mayor, and U.S. Congressman John Conyers, (D-.Michigan) hopefully the most powerful African-American in the congress over the rent-protected Clinton mouthpiece Charles Rangel.

If President-elect Barack Obama tries to ram Hillary Clinton down the American throat, he will be selling us out and giving us chump "change."

I recently discussed this with Obama campaign organizer Jordan Thomas. I was involved in some of the early Obama meetups in New York (when Mrs. Clinton was considered a shoo-in by the talking heads and others). I soon saw that the steadily increasingly well-organized and attended meetups were driven at least in part by the perhaps largely tacit awareness that Hillary Clinton was bad news. UP FRONT News circulation, throughout the Obama campaign, up to and including Michelle Obama, increased substantially. I handed out a great number of UP FRONT News business cards.

Brooklynite Jordan Thomas, a filmmaker originally from the Riverdale area of the Bronx, has done major organizing work for Mr. Obama, some of which was reported in a February 4, 2008 article by Diane Cardwell in the New York Times.

I have asked Mr. Thomas to assist me in accessing the currently not very open Obama network and have sent him an e-mail with the details of the Hillary Clinton chicanery. With some assistance from a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit corporation known as the Center for the Study of the Presidency, I've gotten some e-mail access information for the Obama Transition Team.

I have asked the NYPD to help me access the information from my Bill Clinton/Warren Christopher-engineered arrest and and the subsequent trial. I have sent an e-mail to Congressman Nadler about all this, based on the reality that a progressive veteran Democratic congressman from New York City with lots of seniority should have no difficulty in getting this information directly to Barack Obama and to the Transition Team.

Staten Island human rights activist Bill Johnsen, agreeing that Hillary Clinton is a bad choice for Secretary of State, yesterday asked me to identify better choices. Bill Moyers comes to mind. More realistically Bill Richardson, who has had to deal sometimes confrontationally with North Korean (something that China-doll Clinton would be ill-suited for), who, to Bill Clinton's rage, endorsed Obama, would be better. It is also true that perhaps the most important endorsement that Obama got, the endorsement that ended it for McCain/Palin, was that given by Cheney/Bush victim former Secretary of State (and Bronxite) Colin Powell. I am not partial to the idea of military people in diplomatic roles, but a thoroughly deBush-ized Powell would be far less likely to start a war than let's-bomb-Iran-and-let's-abandon-Tibet and-make-more-money-in-China Hillary Clinton.

Chump "change."
* * * * * * *

THE RETURN OF "PLANNED SHRINKAGE" AND DOMESTIC GENOCIDE.

UP FRONT News November 17, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

THE RETURN OF "PLANNED SHRINKAGE" AND DOMESTIC GENOCIDE.
HOW BUDGET CUTS KILLED PATIENTS AT QUEENS HOSPITAL CENTER IN 1977 AND HOW THE GOVERNMENT (ED KOCH) COVERED IT UP. HOW CHARLES SCHUMER HELPED UNCOVER THE COVERUP. OPPOSE ALL BUDGET CUTS AND DEMAND CORPORATE AND GOVERNMENT GIVEBACKS. SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE: REPEAL INTRO. 458 (SALARY INCREASE FOR NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL)

By Tom Weiss

In 1977 New York City was paralyzed by the historic "fiscal crisis" where the City went broke, blamed it on the poor (welfare, medicaid) and the middle class, and instituted an effectively genocidal policy called "planned shrinkage." That was a euphemism coined by Roger Starr, one of the very politically connected power brokers at The New York Times.

Planned shrinkage was - and is - the label for a policy of balancing budget deficits on the backs of the poor and middle class. It is based on the fallacy that it is public services (health care to the poor, welfare, education, mass transit, libraries, parks, etc., etc.) that are responsible for the deficits in the first place.

The same fiction lies at the root of the bailing out of the corporations, essentially ignoring the forclosure victims, and the local domino effect that has people like New York State Governor David Paterson and New York City Mayor Michael Blooomberg warning of draconian cuts in public services and the self-indulgent grossly overpaid executives at the Metropolitan Transit Authority talking about a fare hike. This is high-level mass pickpocketing, definitely a mass misdemeanor.

In 1977, as a direct result of drastic cuts that resulted in a serious nursing shortage at the NYC Health & Hospitals Corporation-operated Queens Hospital Center, several patients died because of inadequate nursing care. I was a social worker at QHC and also the elected social work representative on the QHC Community Advisory Board as well as an elected shop steward in Local 768 of District Council 37. It was an attending physician, who came to my office and, pledging me to maintain his anonymity, told me that a bunch of patients had died as a direct consequence of the budget cut-caused nursing shortage.

I immediately wrote up the necessary memoranda to the QHC Executive Director political appointee Leroy Carmichael and to Dr. Canute Bernard, the politically appointed Chairman of the QHC Community Advisory Board. The Board had ignored my warnings about imminent medical disaster as a result of the budget cuts. I had talked with lots of nurses.

I was already in trouble with the fundamentally corrupt hospital administration because of my complaints about serious abuses against psychiatric patients on the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-style inpatient unit run by a recurrently sadistic shrink named Alfred Ettinger. The story of a Soviet-style series of human rights violatons against me by the City of New York (Mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch) was well chronicled on the front page of the Queens Edition of Newsday on March 1, 1978.

The Beame people, followed by Ed Koch and the QHC Administration, totally covered up everything, while publicly questioning my mental fitness. The matter, however, made the mainstream media not too long after my meeting at the World Trade Center with Madeleine Penachio, the Patient Advocate for the New York State Department of Health. She investigated and then sent me a letter confirming that my complaints about the budget cut-caused patient deaths at Queens Hospital Center had been "substantiated." Mr. Whelan, the Department of Health Commissioner, issued a press release and within political moments I was being interviewed by Jeff Kamen on Channel 11 News.

I knew that a Channel 11 story would not be sufficient to save lives at QHC, since Ed Koch and his people (including the corrupt administration at QHC, which was run by Queens Borough President Donald Manes, whose subsequent exposure in an ocean of scandal resulted in his suicide, which he accomplished by plunging a dagger into his chest in the kitchen of his Jamaica Estates mansion) were claiming that I was unfit and that everything at QHC was just fine.

And so I went to New York State Assemblyman Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn, who was the Chairman of the Assembly Committee on Oversight and Investigation, which had major oversight responsibility for City and State government agencies. Mr. Schumer had me meet with his Chief Counsel, the at the time heavily bearded Dan Feldman, who later became an assemblyman himself.

Several days after my long meeting with Mr. Feldman, in which I gave him a wealth of documents, he called me and said, "We're going to go with this." That meant that Mr. Schumer would call a press conference. He said they were looking for the right time for maximum exposure. Several days later there were major headlines when someone pulled the plugs on several respirators at NYC-operated Elmhurst Hospital and three patients died. That was the right time.

On February 21, 1978 Mr. Schumer had his press conference, denouncing the City of New York for not only the patient deaths but also for the coverup - but he didn't invite me. And, as far as I am aware from the many news accounts (page one in the Daily News on February 22, 1978) he didn't mention me. (That is interesting because among the reporters I had talked to at some length by telephone about what had happened at QHC was Bob Herbert, then with the Daily News and now a major columnist with The Times.)

Newsday took care of that omission by Mr. Schumer and the other media when its editor in Queens at the time, the very formidable Dennis Duggan, sent his reporter Joseph Treen to do a story on me. Mr. Treen visited me at my loft home in Tribeca, spent a lot of time with me and his essentially accurate story appeared on March 1, 1978, one day before my birthday. Ed Koch responded as he often does when confronted with embarassing facts; he lied, - about me and about QHC. In fact Koch was personally involved in the coverup, as I had met with his close political advisor Herman Badillo, who later told me that he had given all my information personally to Mr. Koch. Newsday (as did other papers such as the Queens Tribune, Our Town, et. al.) followed the story and my subsequent political battles in Queens for years. Indeed, on March 19, 1981 a very good story under the headline "Remember Tom Weiss? He's Back" by columnist Kenneth Gross appeared in Newsday. Newsday, now under very different ownership than it was in 1978, has a history of going after whistleblowing system challenges that other mainstream media shy away from. (The New York Post, then essentially a mouthpiece for Koch, killed the story. So did the Village Voice.) Newsday, with its history of establishment-exposing journalism, is the opposite of for example the Staten Island Advance which, with Political Editor Tom Wrobleski as censor-in-chief, is essentially a mouthpiece for the political establishment.

It took Mr. Schumer's press conference and some correspondence between me and President Jimmy Carter (the reply to me came from his wife) before some emergency federal money was pumped into budget cut-decimated QHC.

It was during my years at Queens Hospital Center that I met Rev. Dr. Timothy P. Mitchell, Pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, in Flushing, Queens. I think Rev. Mitchell had Queens Hospital Center in mind when at a union rally next to City Hall he denounced "planned shrinkage" as "genocide", a reality since many if not most of the patients utilizing QHC as their provider were black.

Gov. Paterson's and Mayor Bloomberg's threatened cuts are potentially genocidal in nature. They will hurt health care for the poor, they will increase the incidence of hunger and they will worsen the housing crisis They will cost lives. Gov. Paterson needs to think again about his opposition to a tax increase for the mega-rich.

The major reason for the financial crisis stems from government policies that encourage and reward greed. The federal government is in the process of having the taxpayers (even poor tax-oppressed Joe the Unlicensed Plumber) pay out billions to reimburse corporations and stockholders plundered by their own CEOs. Think Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers. And that doesn't even include the gazillions in Iraq War blood money profits made at Halliburton of Big Dick Cheney fame.

The governments of New York State and New York City, aside from overpaying themselves, (City Council President Christine Quinn, "The Marie Antoinette of City Hall", is a classic example of that) have over the years given away gazillions in the form of tax abatements to real estate developers and sports team owners who give us what we least need, luxury housing, gentrification, and luxury box-riddled ballparks. And along with the ballpark ripoff (the new Yankee Stadium) we get the perverse glorification of obscenely overpaid athletes like the narcisstic ballplayer/landlord Alex Rodriguez, who, Madonna and Kabbalah notwithstanding, strikes out in the clutch.

Until the plunderers, who include the golden parachuted CEOs, the real estate tycoons, and the "celebrity" economic parasites (without fans buying psychotically priced hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, et. al. A-Rod would be nothing) pay back their fair share, there is no justification for any cuts ar all.

Some months ago, Quinn and Bloomberg essentially snuck something called Intro. 458 through the New York City Council. Intro 458, allowed the Council to substantially raise its own salaries and those of a number of already overpaid Bloomberg aides. The City Councilman who most vociferously protested that ripoff and not only voted against it but, after it predictably passed, refused to accept the extra money, was Tony Avella, the very indepen- dent minded Democrat from Queens and now longshot candidate for Mayor.

The City Council could set a very good budget-cutting example by repealing Intro 458 and thereby giving the money back. It could be used to perhaps help out some hard-pressed food pantries.

"Planned shrinkage" for the non-poor.
* * * * * * *

THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEFT AND BARACK OBAMA: A POST ELECTION FORUM THAT WAS ALSO A PRE-ELECTION 2009 FORUM.

UP FRONT News November 10, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEFT AND BARACK OBAMA: A POST ELECTION FORUM THAT WAS ALSO A PRE-ELECTION 2009 FORUM. ELECTORAL CLASS WAR AGAINST MICHAEL BLOOMBERG AND CHRISTINE QUINN. THE SILENCE ON LENORA FULANI.

By Tom Weiss

The November 8 post-election forum sponsored by the NYC People's Convention 2009, which featured speakers including NYC Councilmember Charles Barron, the newly elected State Assemblymember Inez Barron, and Larry Hamm, the President of the New Jersey People's Organization for Progress, served notice that Barack Obama cannot ignore the African-American left.

Election results show that the split-the-left presidential candidacies of Ralph Nader (running as a so-called "independent") and Cynthia McKinney (the candidate of the almost lily-white Green Party) attracted minimal support as most of what amounts to the "left" voted for Obama.

Mr. Barron, a member of the Democratic Party, made it clear that the financial crisis exposes the self-destructive nature of "capitalism." There was little disagreement from the the other speakers or the audience. I was glad that Mr. Barron shared my view that the bailout plan passed by the congress rewards greed and that the only relevant discussion of "bail" should involve the money necessary to free the corporate predators responsible from jail.

Mr. Barron described Barack Obama, whom he supported for the presidency as "the custodian of an imperialistic foreign policy and a capitalistic domestic policy." He described capitalism as a "failure." (He also used as a comparison the case of Communist Cuba, which offers free education and health care - but neglected to mention that, from the civil liberties perspective, Castro's Cuba is awful.)

Mr. Barron also pointed (correctly I believe) to the intellectualization of the left. I for one have stopped attending cover-charge "left" conferences at places like Cooper Union with well-compensated "left" college professors masquerading as proletarian guerrilla fighters.

Presumably to the dismay of pseudo-anarchists (Richard Degen comes to mind) who wear "vote for Dennis Kucinich" and "vote for Cynthia McKinney" buttons but refuse to register to vote, Mr. Barron emphasized the importance of electoral politics, citing his East New York/ Brownsville community as an example of increasingly empowered neighborhoods.

Although the Q&A after the morning speakers was too short, I did get a question in. Citing the 2009 municipal elections, fundamentally altered by the Michael Bloomberg/Christine Quinn-engineered "third term" coup d'etat, a maneuver that fosters the fascistic illusion that the financial crisis can only be addressed by one "leader" (shades of Weimar Germany), I asked about the prospects of unseating both Bloomberg and Quinn. Mr. Barron made it clear that he will work for the defeat of both but expressed no favorite for mayor. (If the Democratic primary were today, I'd vote for the very independent Councilmember Tony Avella of Queens. If mayoral candidate U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner becomes the Democratic candidate, I think, in the absence of some kind of sellout, the progressive and debate-skilled Weiner would tear the Teflon off Michael Bloomberg.)

Mr. Barron did say that, in light of the Bloomberg/Quinn coup, which will probably lead to a third term for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, he is discontinuing his candidacy for Brooklyn BP. He told me later that he expects to run for the U.S. Congress.

Larry Hamm, whom I know from our work together in organizing a large anti-War demonstration in Newark in the summer of 2007, is probably the most vocal human rights advocate in New Jersey. He spoke at some length about "third party" politics. He said that early on he had supported Democratic presidential candidate Kucinich. When Kucinich (whose campaign organization had its share of Lyndon LaRouche types, and therefore never went anywhere) dropped out, Mr. Hamm looked toward John Edwards because his "program was better." (Edwards by the way also had at least one LaRouche element in his campaign in the form of a "Progressive Democrats of America"-infiltration character named Charles Lenchner, connected to LaRouche's magazine Executive Intelligence Review. Lenchner, one of the Jewish people who has sold out to the racist LaRouche, also had worked for Kucinich. He later worked for a LaRouche ideologue and 2006 U.S, Senate candidate Jonathan Tasini and in that capacity literally tried to push me around when I was running for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton. Visit www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com.)

Mr. Hamm then read the statistics on third party (mainly Nader and McKinney) vote totals in New Jersey. They were microscopic. I pointed out to Mr. Hamm that obstacles facing third party candidates are negligible when compared to the problems afflicting write-in candidates such as myself. After all the Green Party, the so-called Independence Party of New York, and the Working Famlies Party are machines.

While Mr. Hamm made it clear that the entire notion of third party politics needs to be re-examined he made no mention of one of the more toxic realities of third party politics, certainly in New York and therefore nationally. That toxic reality is named Lenora Fulani.

The African-American Lenora Fulani is now trying to live down her history of virulent anti- Jewish rhetoric, some of which she learned from her political godparents "Dr." Fred Newman, a classic self-hating Jewish person (and sex-with-your-therapist "social therapy" cult leader) the American fuehrer-wannabe LaRouche. For more on Fulani/Newman/LaRouche, read UP FRONT News at www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com, and check out the work of investigative reporter Dennis King and the Rick A. Ross Institute.

The neo-fascist Fulani, singing the siren song of third party or "independent" politics, from her post-New Alliance Party power base in the Independence Party of New York, used lies and threats (in particular against me) to infiltrate the Green Party in New York and co-opt the Nader presidential candidacies. The purpose? To out-left the left (including of course the Democrats) and factionalize progressives and thereby enhance the right. That tactic (invented by the "socialist" Adolf Hitler) worked perfectly in Florida in 2000. Fascism only makes political headway with the deterioration of social and economic conditions that result from right-wing government.

In 2008 Fulaniite Green Gerald Kann (involved, with his pal George Tatevosyan in a witnessed violent attack on me to prevent my attending an April, 2004 Ralph Nader news in conference in Manhattan which also featured Fulani) a twice soundly defeated Green Party City Council candidate in Long island City/Astoria, Queens), was the #1 Naderite in New York while many of many of the rest of Fulani's Greens backed McKinney.

It is striking that in a forum which was so solidly anti-Bloomberg, Fulani's name did not come up. In 2001 Bloomberg cut a classic deal with the devil by accepting the racist Fulani's endorsement for mayor, which gave him the critically needed Independence Party of New York ballot line. It was the votes Bloomberg got on the IPNY line that enabled him to squeak by Democrat Mark Green in the very close election in 2001. Bloomberg and Fulani jumped into a political bed together again in 2005 to help defeat Democrat Fernando Ferrer. In exchange Fulani and her front organization, the All Stars Project, have gotten tax breaks from the Bloomberg-controlled Industrial Development Agency.

Although Fulani has been somewhat disempowered in the IPNY, she remains influential through surrogates such as IPNY Rules Committee co-chair lawyer Harry Kresky and particularly in Staten Island via her loyalist Sara Lyons (another story suppressed by the politically censored Staten Island Advance and its Political Editor Tom Wrobleski).

And that brings me to another scheduled speaker at the Forum, Brenda Stokely. Since there is already some coverage of Ms. Stokely ("The Black Panzer") in UP FRONT News, I won't go into much detail here.

I spent the years 1989 until 1993 as the social work colleague of Ms. Stokely at the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA), a Jewish philanthropy-funded refugee resettlement organization that handled the resettlement of thousands of Jews fleeing the Soviet Union as well as the Tibetan Resettlement Project, for exiles fleeing the Chinese Communist-pepetrated Genocide in that land. Ms. Stokely stopped talking in a civilized fashion to me the day when we had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Greenwich Village and I made a comment critical of Lenora Fulani.

Ms. Stokely proceeded to have me temporarily ousted as an elected shop steward in District Council 1707, in a kangaroo court proceeding that a union official described as a "lynching."

I ran again and defeated her soundly as she finished dead last, doing even worse than Ralph Nader did in New Jersey. On one occasion Ms. Stokely launched a shrieking tirade at me at social work department meeting.

Things got even heavier when I learned of reports that Ms. Stokely, in what she thought was the privacy of her office, hurled racist insults at her Jewish clients. Quotations attributed to her and reported by translators present at social worker meetings with clients included insults about body hygiene and suggestions to "Go back to Russia." After I received a number of such reports I contacted NYANA administration. And since Ms. Stokely, her union rhetoric notwithstanding, had a cozy relationship with the notoriously anti-labor management, she got off easy with a reprimand.

Stokely has also been mixed up with a classic "Green" Fulani/LaRouche hoaxter named Paul ("Zool") Zulkowitz, who started a near police riot in September, 2005 when he staged his own arrest at peace activist Cindy Sheehan's talk at his so-called "Camp Casey" in Union Square in 2005. Mr. Barron should know all about Zulkwowitz, a smallish white guy with a history of serious psychopathology on both coasts, who has had delusions of being a Black Panther. He once publicly described Ralph Nader as "like a father to me." I would imagine that, if Nader has any sense left, he has put Zulkwowitz (who once threatened to commit suicide because I had criticized him and his psychopathic LaRouche-ite pal Geoffrey Blank in UP FRONT News) up for adoption. That led to Zulkowitz' being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility in Long Island. And then, upon Zulkowitz' apparently premature discharge from the hospital, he told a friend that he planned to shoot me with a firearm in his possession. It should be no surprise that Zulkowitz, Tatevosyan, Kann, Blank, et. al. are persons of interest to law enforcement at all levels of government.

Although in recent months Ms. Stokely has refrained from launching any of her trademake racist outbursts in my presence, I am not aware that she has had some sort of an enlightening epiphany about Jewish people.

Mr. Barron, in acknowledging upcoming speaker Brenda Stokely in the audience at the forum, suggested that Ms. Stokely run for the City Council. Yeesh! Indeed, despite the residency factor, we might be better off with Sarah Palin.

Under any circumstances, Michael Bloomberg - and Lenora Fulani - have to go!
* * * * * * *

JOY RYDER OF STATEN ISLAND

UP FRONT News November 20, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

By Tom Weiss

I first saw Joy Ryder perform when she was the singer for the Davis/Ryder band (with lead guitarist Avis Davis) in the late 1970's at the "Belo Soho" festival in the neighborhood now known as Tribeca, where I lived from 1977 until 1993, beleaguered by Thomas Berger, one of the greediest loftlords since the Book of Genesis.

The Davis/ Ryder band performed at since gentrified out of existence clubs like Garris' on West Broadway. Although Ms. Ryder is an authenfic original it would be unfair not to suggest that anyone who likes Janis Joplin and/or Aretha Frankin and/or Mavis Staples will probably like Joy Ryder. Although Joy tells me that she sings gospel, she is best known as a rock 'n' roll and blues belter.

The Tribeca-based Davis/Ryder Band became somewhat famous in connection with a performance in the 1970's at a huge anti-nuke festival in New York City. Ms. Ryder performed recurrently at Max's Kansas City, the late Manhattan rock club that featured musicians including Lou Reed and Patti Smith, among others.

Some months ago I was very surprised to meet up again with Joy Ryder at The Cup, a popular club in the Stapleton community of Staten Island (where I live) known for its grass roots music, poetry, dance comedy, theatre and political events. I think I probably remembered Joy Ryder from the last millenium better than she recalled me but after a few minutes of conversation about Davis/Ryder, Tribeca, and Garris' we had a rapport. Ms. Ryder, who now lives in Staten Island told me some about more recent years, including a life-threatening medical emergency that she has survived.

I saw her perform again in the waning days of the CBGB gallery, next door to CBGB's, which has since been replaced by a very upscale boutique (Varvatos) catering to the needs of the nouveau hipster generation that populates Lower Manhattan, and which was the target of an anti-gentrification protest some months ago by a group called "Take It to the Bridge" led by the Lower East Side musician/community activist Rebecca Moore.

A few months ago Ms. Ryder was the lead performer at a rock 'n' roll retrospective show at a Manhattan club Otto's Shrunken Head organized by Max's Kansas City producer Peter Courtney.

Last July 20 Ms. Ryder performed several songs at an "UP FRONT News presents" show at the Cup. I managed to arrange for her to be accompanied by guitarist and Staten Island resident Michael Packer, whose Michael Packer Blues Band has performed around the world and some months ago opened for the (Beatles pre-Ringo Starr drummer) Pete Best Band at the Rodeo Bar & Grill in Manhattan. Although they had never performed together, it worked out very well.

Ms. Ryder, who maintains her involvement in the peace movement, performed recently at the Raccoon Lodge, one of the few working class bars to survive the gentrification of Tribeca.

A Joy in Staten Island.
*******

"THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE IS THE MOST RACIST PAPER IN NEW YORK."

UP FRONT News November 5, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

"THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE IS THE MOST RACIST PAPER IN NEW YORK." A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEWS SUPPESSION AND DISTORTION AT THE BILLIONAIRE DONALD NEWHOUSE-OWNED ADVANCE. IS POLITICAL EDITOR TOM WROBLESKI A "WRACIST?" GOOD QUESTION!

By Tom Weiss

In the spring of 2007, during a major political confrontation precipitated by the arbitrary action of the imperious New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn ("The Marie Antoinette of City Hall"), who, in collusion with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arbitrarily overruled the wishes of the Brooklyn community of Bedford-Stuyvesant, which had decided to change the name of a few blocks of a local street to honor the late African-American activist Sonny Abubadika Carson, I was at a protest demonstration in Brooklyn on the issue. I was stand- ing next to Staten Island African-American activist and former candidate for elective office Kelvin Alexander. Sonny Carson, who had been active in getting drug traffickers out of the community and who was involved in the creation of Medgar-Evers College, had also once some years ago reportedly responded to a question about anti-Semitism by denying any such views but confessing to "anti-white" feelings. That comment has angered Ms. Quinn , Michael Bloomberg and some others who know very little about Sonny Carson.

As far as I was (and am) concerned, the main issue was (and is) one of community self-determination. Mr. Alexander agrees. The Bedford-Stuyvesant community was very much in support of the street name change and expressed itself in a petition signed by thousands and the vocal support of elected officials including City Councilmembers Al Vann and Charles Barron. The proposed name change was perhaps rendered even more rational by virtue of the fact that the existing name, "Gates", memorializes another slaveowner.

Mr. Alexander and I talked some about Staten Island politics, which is essentially run by almost lily-white major party machines protected by the establishment-coddling multi-billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance. I have a multi-year history of battling news censorship and slanted political reporting at that paper directly involving for the most part Political Editor Tom Wrobleski. In fact in 2005 Wrobleski sat on the story of my candidacy for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton for months. Indeed, as I have said and written, Tom Wrobleski has the de facto gold medal for not answering phone messages and e-mails. The tactiturn Wrobleski is the Dick Cheney of New York journalism.

All of that changed on August 26, 2005 when Dan Janison of Newsday accurately reported the public dispute between myself and the seriously paranoid NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, with whom via a member of my family I have been acquainted since my Aunt Dolly's funeral in 1979. Ms. Gotbaum has a closetful of political skeletons involving things like ties to the CIA and related adultery. Once the wealthy and very connected Gotbaum learned of my work as a free lance investigative journalist, she tried to protect herself from me. Once she tried to have me arrested when I was at her office for a scheduled appointment with her Chief of Staff to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters. I got saved by the NYPD's Sgt. Al Fiore, who is definitely more stable and competent than the quite impaired Gotbaum.

And then Gotbaum lost it when in she claimed to the lawyer and NYC Public Advocate candidate Norman Siegel that I was "stalking" her.

She then repeated that defamatory reference to me in a televised campaign debate also covered in the print media. As regards "stalking", Ms. Gotbaum really flatters herself since as a journalist I sometimes cover events she is at. As reported by me, the notion of "stalking" Betsy Gotbaum - or anyone else for that matter - reminds me of the country song "I Ain't That Lonely Yet" by Dwight Yoakum. Gotbaum later very quietly apologized by via a telephone call from an aide to my friend and UP FRONT News Editorial Advisor Willard Whittingham.

On August 26 NYC Newsday published an essentially accurate article reporting not only my side of the Gotbaum vs. Weiss matter but also the fact that I was a candidate for the U.S. Senate. That story was read all over City Hall and many other places in the five boroughs and Long Island. (Newsday is a much better and more widely read newspaper than the Advance.) In an act of apparent desperation, Wrobleski called me asking for an "exclusive."

Following a brief telephone interview, his article, with a front page lead, appeared in the Advance on August 27, 2005. It was willfully error-riddled and slanted. Indeed, since Wrobleski's article contained falsehoods reported as facts, my lawyer at the time characterized it as defamatory. The Advance promised corrections and reneged. It also refused to publish the letters to the editor they asked me to send.

On August 27 much more accurate stories appeared in the Daily News (by Celeste Katz) and The New York Times (by Jonathan Hicks).

When, in my conversation with Kelvin Alexander at the Sonny Carson rally, I mentioned the Advance, he interrupted me and, with a hard stare, said, "The Staten Island Advance is the most racist paper in New York." When I expressed some reservation about the word "most", he repeated it.

In light of my now several years of experience with the Advance, I have to conclude that Mr. Alexander is right.

After the slanted Gotbaum article appeared, Wrobleski reverted to total censorship of my U.S. Senate candidacy. I then wrote a widely circulated article on http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/ that criticized the Advance for censorship and referred to Tom "Wrongleski." Some days later I was on the phone with editor Dean Balsamini, who was fully aware of my candidacy and my media history. As we talked he read my article on his computer and exclaimed over the phone, "You trashed my reporter."

I reminded him of Wrobleski's slanted reporting and news suppression. Not too long after that I received a call from Wrobleski asking for a telephone interview.

His article, appearing on the front page of the Advance on August 21, 2006 under the headline "With the stroke of a pencil, vote for anyone", would have received perhaps a C+ in a second level school of journalism." Wrobleski's article essentially protected Mrs. Clinton by for the most part ignoring my major human rights issues with the very corporate Republicrat Hillary and focused on the technicalities of a write-in candidacy. Near the end he did mention the Tibet Genocide (the Clintons are directly involved in the coverup of the Tibet Geno-cide and I have the proof), which makes the Advance perhaps the only paper anywhere to report a genocide and not follow it up.

And since the Tibet Genocide involves the brutal oppression of a dark-complexioned people culturally and ethnically distinct people and nation by a light-complexioned totalitarian regime, it is racist and covering it up is also racist.

And that explains why, during my recent write-in candidacy for the U.S. Congress in the 13th Congressional District (all of S.I. and parts of Brooklyn), in a long telephone conversation between Wrobleski and my Communications Director Frank De Luca, the Advance man said he did "not care" what I said or wrote about Tibet and Hillary Clinton. This guy should head the Beijing desk.

The Advance has suppressed stories on major negligences by State Assemblyman Matthew Titone. Titone, who has angered at least one minister with his habitual disregard of the truth and his failure to properly provide mandated constitiuent services to me, may well be facing questioning by the ethics people in Albany (who have responded to emails and calls from me) not to speak of law enforcement. Perhaps that kind of news suppression at the Advance is to be expected as in Wrobleski's defamatory August 27, 2005 article about me he allowed one Keith Parascandola, Chief of Staff to both the late John Lavelle and then Titone (talk about being entrenched in what has been rightly rated "the worst state legislature in the country") to slander me in print. The same holds true for State Senator Diane Savino, whose at least borderline violent Chief of Staff Robert Cataldo once nearly assaulted me in her district office at 36 Richmond Terrace, a short walk from the St. George ferry terminal. Cataldo has a police record as a result. Not a syllable in the Advance.

Among the stories downplayed in the Advance was the Sonny Carson confrontation which was heavily reported in all other NYC media. Among those who most vociferously played the race card along with Bloomberg and Quinn was North Shore Staten Island Councilman Michael McMahon, who took it upon himself to further ingratiate himself with "Quinnberg" by denouncing Carson at the Council.

And that explains at least in part why, with the exception of a September 16 report by Wrobleski at the Advance blog at http://blog.silive.com/politics/2008/09/weiss_writein.html, my campaign for the U.S. Congress (McMahon was the leading candidate) went unreported in that newspaper.

The Advance has also covered up the very politically relevant matter of the Independence Party of New York's racist albatross Lenora Fulani and her ties to the IPNY congressional candidacy of Carmine Morano. Among the people escaping coverage in this matter are the IPNY-entrenched Fulani's Staten Island loyalist Sara Lyons and the much more serious Fulani's links to the convicted felon and mega-fascist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

In that regard the Advance's Deborah Young censored out of her November 13, 2005 story on a so-called "peace festival" on November 12, 2005 in Tappen Park in Staten Island, the loud confrontation between me and anticipated guest speaker neo-fascist and terrorism-linked LaRouche ideologue Geoffrey Blank.

All this explains why the Advance, over considerable e-mailed protests from community leaders such as Kelly Thompson ("Drinking Liberally" discussion group, S.I. branch) and Rabbi Gerald Sussman of the Temple Emanu-El, Staten Island in Port Richmond, et. al., excluded me from its two candidates debates. In the second debate, the rather obsequeous co-sponsor the S.I. Chamber of Commerce caved in. I would not want to be in an ethical foxhole with the likes of Linda N. Baran, the President & CEO of the S.I. Chamber.

I did participate as a candidate in debates sponsored by a coalition of non-profit anti-poverty groups at the Olivet Presbyterian Church (October 16) and also by the Staten Island branch of the NAACP (November 2). I also spoke as a candidate at the October 26 service of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton (of which I am a member) led by Staten Island's most outspoken and well-known civil rights leader Rev. Demetrius Carolina, who reads UP FRONT News as well as the Bible.

Fortunately the First Amendment in Staten Island has not been totally interred by the Advance (known to increasing numbers of people as "The Staten Island Retreat"). In the context of my Advance-ordered exclusion from its congressional candidates debates, which took place at the very corporate Hilton-owned Garden Inn Hotel in the rather remote Bloomfield area, near New Jersey, William Kline, the Co-editor in Chief of "The Banner", the newspaper of the College of Staten Island, wrote a solid story about my congressional cam- paign appearing in the October 27, 2008 edition under the headline "No Room in Garden Inn." There are now thousands of copies throughout Staten Island and beyond. I've put it on the internet.

Mr. Kline, who expects to attend one of the better graduate schools of journalism after graduation, seems like a good political reporter, which probably means he would not be welcome to work at Donald Newhouse's Staten Island Advance.

Racism is a major problem in Staten Island. Indeed some of the more egregious incidents, such as the Hallowe'en, 2007 police abduction of a reportedly egg-throwing black young-ster, do get covered in the Advance, which cannot afford to suppress S.I. events covered in the other media. And as regards consistently getting scooped on political stories by other media, in fact it was the other tabloids, Newsday, Daily News and New York Post, which broke early stories years ago on the very belatedly disgraced Vito Fossella. The Advance protected Fossella for years. The Virginia police on the lookout for (philandering) drunks at the wheel get the credit for ending that censorship.

Mr. Kline at The Banner (I've also been covered in other college print and broadcast media, e.g. Queens College "Knight News", radio stations at Binghamton University and SUNY Purchase, "The Spectator" at Columbia University, and at the College of Staten Island's WSIA) has expressed interest in other stories that might be covered up at the Advance such as violent racism of an anti-Jewish nature (against me) at Workforce1, a employment assistance and training agency at 60 Bay Street in Staten Island. That situation, already reported in UP FRONT News, and well known in civil rights and some religioius circles, is being investigated by the NYC Commission on Human Rights. Violent people such as the menacing Allen Dawson, a racist thug and now known to the NYPD who is being protected by admistrators like Workforce1's Robin Johnson, need to be exposed.

Having lived in all five boroughs I have grown to like Staten Island - with its very energetic and often cover charge-absent grass roots arts world, its open mics, its First Central Baptist Church and other houses of worship, its small town qualities and its actual ruralness, its Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, free ferry and (relative to for example Manhattan) rational prices for at least some of life's necessities, etc. - a great deal.

Staten Island however has long way to do to clean up its machine politics.
And as far as the Staten Island Advance is concerned, the fact that this politically racist newspaper has some black reporters is window dressing of the sort made famous at the Republican National Convention of 2000 in Philadelphia where the white citizens council known as Karl Rove/Dick Cheney/George Bush put a bunch of complaint and connected African-American people out front on the dais. The Condoleezza Rice Effect.

The crime reporting in the Advance is thorough, as is its high school sports coverage. The "World" Section sometimes runs some interesting national and international stories from the Associated Press and Reuters. The supermarket advertising is of Pulitzer Prize quality. And I actually got quoted by a presumably Wrobleski-free reporter named Maura Yates in her story a few months ago on the often really instrusive and inconsiderate ferryboat "preach- ers." My comment merely reported what I have often told these guys who are under the very mistaken impression that Jesus had bad manners. I reminded them that "Jesus said, 'speak softly'" and that "You're creating a boatload of atheists." At least, unlike Tom Wrobleski, she didn't misquote me.

Politically, as long as Tom Wrobleski and Editor Brian Laline (Laline is the George W. Bush to Wrobleski's Dick Cheney) are in power, the Staten Island Advance will be the worst newspaper in New York.
* * * * * * *

ENDGAME FOR BETSY GOTBAUM, THE REAL REASONS.

UP FRONT News November 7, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

ENDGAME FOR BETSY GOTBAUM, THE REAL REASONS. THE NEW YORK TIMES SCRATCHES THE SURFACE OF A DISHONEST, CIA-LINKED
AND PARANOID PUBLIC OFFICIAL.

By Tom Weiss

I first met Betsy Gotbaum at my Aunt Dolly Perutz' funeral in 1979, well before she became the NYC Public Advocate. It was then that I learned that Betsy had, since childhood, been a close friend of the Perutzes. My mother's older surviving brother was Tino Perutz, although her oldest brother, Ladi, was killed fighting for the Germany-allied Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. Betsy and the Perutz' daughter Kathy, my cousin, became the closest of friends.

Although I became acquainted with Betsy Gotbaum at the funeral I kept a political distance because her husband Victor, was the very powerful head of District Council 37, the municipal workers union. I had been very publicly human rights-violated by Ed Koch when, as a social worker, elected union shop steward and elected member of the Queens Hospital Center Community Advisory Board, I had blown the whistle on the coverup of budget cut-caused patient deaths at City-operated QHC. I was put through a Soviet Union style psychiatric evaluation trip, arrested and fired for exposing not only de facto genocide at the hospital but also often racist abuse of psychiatric patients there.

The Union, which went through the motions of representing me, was not much help. That may have had everything to do with the fact that I was among the union dissidents who objected to the very autocratic Victor Gotbaum's de facto alliances at worker expense with people like the extraordinarily anti-poor and corrupt Ed Koch.

It cost me my job and years of blacklisting. With some help from the NYS Health Department (which investigated and "substantiated" my claims), some doctors, the civil rights leader and Martin Luther King associate Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell and a few courageous politicians such as then City Councilmember Mary Codd from Staten Island (things have gotten worse politically in S.I. and beyond since her departure), and with major broadcast and print media coverage (including a front page coverage of me in the March 1, 1978 of the Queens Edition of Newsday) I got QHC the money it needed to hire enough nurses that had been let go to satisfy the demands of the bankers and their politicians.

My post-Perutz funeral contacts with Betsy Gotbaum were rare although my contacts with the Perutz family have continued through the years. Kathy Perutz is a very well known writer who has counted people like Norman Mailer as very close friends. She has done major human rights work, e.g. in the prisons.

Betsy Gotbaum and I became re-acquainted at a 2001 Public Advocate candidates forum on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. After the debate (Norman Siegel was the best debater), I went over to Ms. Gotbaum, who took a few seconds before she recognized me and became effusively friendly. We talked about family and some politics for several minutes and she gave me a bunch of inside personal telephone numbers including her office number at the Museum of Natural History, of which she was CEO. She literally urged me to call her "anytime." She had also been the NYC Parks Commissioner. This lady is not only very rich, she is very connected.

I waited for some weeks and then called her at the Museum. No response - and then some serious security guard hostility when I stopped in at the Museum. She did once call me as, accorcding to her, she was on her way to the airport for a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Despite her assurances, I never heard from her again.

Some years later, having experienced staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers, encouraged by my late Rabbi Harold Swiss, who was personally acquainted with by now NYC Public Advocate Gotbaum, I arranged an appointment at her Municipal Building office with her Chief of Staff Scott Coccaro to discuss the homeless abuse problem.

I got there on time. As I arrived, Ms. Gotbaum was leaving. She said, "Hi, Tom" and left. Perhaps a half hour after the scheduled appointment time, I was approached in the reception area by two men. They introduced themselves as police officers. The name I easily remember is Sgt. Al Fiore. He told me that Ms. Gotbaum had complained that I had made a "threat" against Linda Gibbs, who at the time was the Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services. In fact the NYCDHS had covered up the staff abuse matter and done other Giulianiesque things harmful to the homeless and I had criticized Gibbs in UP FRONT News.

I of course had never made a "threat" against Gibbs, although I acknowledged that Ms. Gibbs, like Gotbaum, might feel threatened by UP FRONT News. I explained all that to Sgt. Fiore and his partner. Very fortunately Sgt. Fiore did not only play the role of "good cop", he is a good cop. It took him perhaps 15 minutes of questioning me to realize that Gotbaum's claims as regards a "threat" by me were nonsense. He told me to go home and leave Betsy Gotbaum alone for awhile. I most certainly did. Paranoid people, especially those in high public office, can be very dangerous.

Realizing that Betsy Gotbaum was ill-suited to be Public Advocate, I supported Norman Siegel. One day as I was doing some volunteer work for Mr.Siegel, he asked to speak with me. He told me that he had received a complaint from Gotbaum that I had been "stalking" her. I told him about my personal relationship with her and her attempt to have me arrested. I told him that I have never stalked anyone and told him that, as a journalist, I've sometimes been at event she is at. I also told him that, following Gotbaum's (no doubt Tom Weiss UP FRONT News-related) sudden termination of what had been a 40 year friendship with my cousin Kathy, I had learned that among the skeletons in the Gotbaum political closet was a past and unsuccessful marriage to a CIA agent. (As far as I am concerned, if Ms. Gotbaum has an attraction for spies, that is her right; it is not her right to keep a marriage to a government spy a secret.) I also learned that things did not work out with the agent and that Gotbaum ended up in an adulterous affair with someone else. Some of what the New York Post would probably describe as "steamy" trysts took place at the Perutz home in a very wealthy section of Great Neck, Long Island.

Norman Siegel, who, for all his solid civil rights credentials, has been known to to accept political support from some loser types like the Howard Deaniac and "liberal" autocrat Tracy Denton (who also once tried to have me arrested, paranoia in the Manhattan liberal establishment being a contagious ailment). The serious conflict of interest of a spy-connected Public Advocate went unmentioned in Siegel's campaign and he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, something that happens to almost candidate who utilizes the services of a fraud like Tracy Denton.

Betsy Gotbaum, her paranoia apparently not treated psychiatrically, made things far worse when in a televised campaign debate she refused her opponents' (including Mr. Siegel) request that she disclose her appointment schedule (which, going back some time, would include me). She explained her refusal by claiming that she was being "stalked" by a homeless person.

When I saw that comment in the Daily News, I knew she was referring to me and so I called the paper and within a matter of a couple of hours I was sitting at the Raccoon Lodge tavern in Tribeca with the News City Hall reporter Celeste Katz and a News photographer. Although my picture did not get into the August 27, 2005 article. Ms. Katz' story was essentially accurate. I am glad that she mentioned my "Free Tibet" shirt and she quoted me accurately when I said that Gotbaum was a fraud and that she should quit. The Daily News, however, neglected to mention the fact that I was also a candidate for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton.

My candidacy however was not ignored by Newsday's City Hall reporter Dan Janison, whose story on the Gotbaum vs. Weiss dispute came out in NYC Newsday on August 26., 2005.

My side of the story was also reported by Jonathan Hicks in The New York Times on August 27, 2005.

Bringing up the rear was none other than the censorship prince of New York journalism, Tom Wrobleski of the Staten Island Advance. Apparently within moments of having been scooped by Newsday Wrobleski, who had been suppressing the news of my U.S. Senate candidacy for months, called me for an "exclusive." We did a brief telephone interview. The billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance should consider itself fortunate that I didn't sue the paper for libel. His front page lead story was riddled with errors printed as fact and contained defamatory comments about me by State Senator Diane Savino (who still employs as her Chief of Staff a violence-prone character named Robert Cataldo). It contained similar remarks by a fundamentally inept and negligent Albany hack named Keith Parascandola, who worked as Chief of Staff for the late Assemblyman John Lavelle and and then his really bad successor Matthew Titone, also known as the ambassador to Staten Island from the Empire of Christine Quinn. As far as I am concerned, Parascandola could have done well as the Chief of Staff for Caligula.

Tom Wrobleski, who exists to cover up corruption in S.I. (e.g. Fossella, Titone, et. al.) racist genocide (e.g. in Tibet), politics (e.g. my candidacies for the U.S. Senate and more recently for the U.S. House of Representatives, domestic fascism e.g. Lyndon LaRouche) is a major reason why the Staten Island Advance has been properly characterized as "the most racist paper in New York."

Fernanda Santos, a free lance journalist writing for The New York Times wrote a story appearing in The Times under the headline, "Betsy Gotbaum Says She Will Not Seek Re-election as the City's Public Advocate." Gotbaum's stated reasons as reported in The Times are as phony as she has been for decades. She talks about her opposition to Bloomberg's third term plans. (I can understand her not wanting to be tarred with Bloomberg's wish to become emperor to Quinn's empress.) Gotbaum mentions the highly publicized death last year of her step-daughter-in-law Carol Anne Gotbaum, who was arrested in a reportedly seriously intoxicated state at the Phoenix airport while on a stopover to a rehab facility. Carol Anne was detained, and left unattended while shackled to a fixture in a holding area where she accidentally asphyxiated herself in an attempt to escape. Reports suggest that Carol Anne had a long psychiatric and substance abuse history. Perhaps Betsy Gotbuam, who lost legal actions against the Phoenix authorities, would like to explain why the apparently acutely psychologically afflicted Carol Anne was traveling alone thousands of miles away from home.

Gotbaum, who willfully has covered up staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters, depicts herself in The Times article as an advocate fore the poor and as "the rebel." Yeesh! She is all about money, power and deception! Shades of the pseudo-"mavericks" John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Well after I reported the Gotbaum/CIA connection in UP FRONT News, the Times' Hicks reported it in a 2005 story about Gotbaum. Hicks, however, committed a Village Voice-style journalistic ethical no-no, when he failed to write that the Gotbaum/CIA story has been first reported in UP FRONT News.

The real reason that the paranoid but deeply ambitious Gotbaum - who has fantasized about running for mayor (Sarah Palin would do better in an election here) - is not running again is because of exposure in UP FRONT News.

The New York Times, although way ahead of the steadily "retreating" Staten Island Advance, has scratched the surface of the very impaired and potentially destructive (Gotbaum has still not made her telephone apology to me via UP FRONT News Editorial Advisor Willard Whittingham about the "stalker" defamation public) Betsy Gotbaum.

And as far as "stalking" Betsy Gotbaum is concerned, I refer the reader again to the compelling country song by Dwight Yoakum, "I Ain't That Lonely Yet."
* * * * * * *

MICHAEL McMAHON, LLC. A LIMITED LIABILITY COUNCILMAN

UP FRONT News October 24, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com http://www.tomweissforuscongress.blogspot.com
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/upfrontnewsdiscussionforum

MICHAEL McMAHON, LLC. A LIMITED LIABILITY COUNCILMAN WHO WANTS TO BE A (STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE-PROTECTED) LIMITED LIABILITY CONGRESSMAN. CHURCH AND POLITICS.

By Tom Weiss

If I were a real estate developer desirous of building luxury housing and accelerating the gentrification of working class neighborhoods such as Stapleton, S.I., with the accompanying "if necessary" displacement of poor people and small businesses and I was registered to vote in Staten Island, I'd probably vote for the Democratic Party machine congressional candidate, City Councilman Michael McMahon.

If I were someone hostile to the concept of self-determination for African-American neighborhoods, including those, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, which seek to honor community heroes such as the controversial black nationalist Sonny Abubadika Carson, I'd vote for the Carson-denouncing Michael McMahon.

If I were someone who cared not a whit about the over half century of a racist Chinese Communist-perpetrated Genocide in Tibet and chose not to support the Councilman Tony Avella-introduced NYC Coucil resolution #1299, which cited the Tibet Genocide and called for the removal of the 2008 Olympic games from Beijing, I would vote for Mr. McMahon.

If I generally ignored African-American communities such as Stapleton except at election time, and then parachuted into black churches Hillary Clinton-style at politically fortuitous moments, I'd vote for Mr. McMahon.

If I received major campaign donations from the over-development and gentrification-profiting construction industry and its associated labor moguls, I'd vote for Mr. McMahon.

If thought it was right for a Councilman to deny his services to a constituent because that constituent (me) criticized his political boss City Council Speaker Christine Quinn ("The Marie Antoinette of City Hall") I'd vote for Michael McMahon.

If I chose to ignore the incontrovertible reality of a politically incestuous relationship between this politician and the "racist" (I am quoting a well-known African-American political activist from Staten Island, who is a Sonny Carson supporter, with whom I agree on the Carson and Staten Island Advance issues) clique that slants and censors the news at a multi-billionaire (Donald Newhouse)-owned Advance, properly described as "controlled" by civil rights leader Rev. Demetrius Carolina of the First Central Baptist Church, I would vote for Michael McMahon.

Michael McMahon, like many of his colleagues at City Hall (considering the abject quality of governance there, I think the term limits should be perhaps 3 minutes) is what I call a Limited Liability Councilman, who seeks to become a Limited Liability Congressman, in both cases a de facto "LLC."

A LLC, or limited liability company, is a profit-making entity that under politician-created laws, gets various tax breaks and, according to Wikipedia, protects owners, known as members, from "some liability for acts and debts" of the LLC. From this definition voters can get some idea of the political biology of the financial crisis, caused by the corporate mega-rich and greedy, and the bailout which rewards them.

Mike McMahon is, as suggested above, guilty of a host of what can fairly be described in political and religious terms as "sins." Most if not all of those sins derive from his apparent and willfull ignorance of one of Jesus' most political teachings, succinctly reported in Timothy I chapter 6, verse 10, no doubt one of the most misquoted lines in the Bible. It is not the money that is "a root of all sorts of evil." It is the "love of money" that is to blame.

It is McMahon favorite Hillary Clinton (McMahon has had to have Obama pretty much politically jammed down his Republicrat throat) whose pathological love of money and power that keeps her silent about the Genocide in Tibet. After all she makes huge money selling her narcissistic books in the slave state known as Communist China.

It is McMahon favorite Quinn who spouts populism at tenants rights meetings and takes oodles of campaign contributions from the landlord lobby.

And the majority of term limit-favoring New Yorkers should not be fooled for one minute by McMahon's outward show of pseudo-independence from the Bloomberg term limits extension coup d'etat by voting "no" on Bloomberg's bill, which attempts to make New York the only city to be governed by a monarchy. McMahon has learned his Hillary Clinton legislative tactics well. The chronically pro-Iraq War militarist Clinton, as she recognized that the country was anti-War, in order to curry favor with progressives, would repeatedly vote against pro-War bills that she knew would pass anyway. Michael McMahon did not get the endorsement of the increasingly Guilianiesque Bloomberg for nothing. McMahon is a major soldier in what I refer to as the Quinnberg Administration, which has been a disaster for poor and working class people.

Some weeks ago, making certain to keep his political parachute hidden, Michael McMahon paid a visit to Rev. Carolina's First Central Baptist Church, of which I am a member. I stifled to urge to roll my eyes as McMahon, opting not to express his views on Sonny Carson, politically flirted about the old days with one of the leading church gospel vocalists.

Fortunately many churchmembers do not rely for their news on the Staten Island Advance, which has to be the most censored paper in New York. Political Editor Tom Wrobleski, who continues to suppress oodles of stories about my campaign, about negligence and corruption in the lily-white Staten Island political establishment and who protected the very belatedly disgraced Vito Fossella for decades and who told my Communications Director Frank De Luca that he doesn't care what I have to say about the racist genocide in Tibet, really should be working for a Chinese Communist newspaper, although the commute to his Stapleton home might be tough. Wrobleski is certainly a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize for Censorship - maybe even a Nobel.

UP FRONT News has a great many readers around New York and beyond. Although I am certain that Michael Bloomberg enjoys the generally obsequeous coverage he gets in a paper increasingly widely known as the Staten Island Retreat, the Advance is not a political or cultural factor north of the Whitehall Ferry terminal. My impression is that the Advance - which I am told is experiencing a circulation drop - is read mainly for its crime and local sports coverage - and for its advertising. Also corporate executives should like it.

Among the places in Staten Island where UP FRONT News is well known is in arts and cultural circles ("The Cup" and "Martini Red" in Stapleton, Everything Goes Bookstore Cafe in Tompkinsville, et. al.) and in some religious places such as the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton and Temple Emanu-El in Port Richmond and hopefully at the College of Staten Island. I've got lots of readers in the NYC City Council, much to McMahon's and Quinn's chagrin.

Mike McMahon, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, is known for bending the rules and sometimes playing dirty. A few weeks ago, one of his aides, Bill Tate, literally forced his way between me and a reporter with whom I was talking at a "Million Fathers" school opening day event and told her not to talk to me. McMahon is also in the habit of handing out money to low income people, including at least one rather gullible member of First Central Baptist Church, to hand out his campaign literature in off-limits supermarket parking lots. Had the volunteer victim been arrested as he told me he feared, would McMahon have gotten him out of jail?

Like Emperor Bloomberg, Councilman McMahon bestows political gifts, including a couple of spots on the Bloomberg-compliant Staten Island Community Board 1, to FCBC members. In fact one member last April at a so-called "peace" event that I helped arrange in the FCBC parking lot went somewhat ballistic at me in his Bloomberg defense when I asked a polite question about speaker invitations. On the rare occasions when I have been rude to someone, I make it a practice to apologize. It's all a part of the Judeo-Christian teachings about atonement and repentance. I have yet to receive an apology from CB1 guy and churchmember Larry Beslow, who apparently operates under a different standard.

Bloomberg and McMahon are well aware of the political influence of Rev. Carolina, although the pastor does not live in New York. I suppose that is why, quite a number of months ago, Mayor Bloomberg "dined" (I don't know about the "wine" part, as this was dinner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not a wedding at Cana) Rev. Carolina at his East 79th St mansion. (Rumors that the mayor's residence is Section 8 housing are false!) I understand that the Mayor-King has promised to visit the church.

Michael McMahon had his several minutes of political speaking as a candidate time at the church. I look forward to my time.

In any case, vote for human rights and vote for me.
* * * * * * *

I SUGGEST A TERM LIMIT OF THREE MINUTES

UP FRONT News October 25, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com
http://www.tomweissforuscongress.blogspot.com
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/upfrontnewsdiscussionforum

By Tom Weiss

The still identity-anonymous Thunderbird's suggestion that the NPSC has "nothing to say" is irrelevant since, as a loosely defined group with no formal membership, the NPSC doesn't generally take positions, although list-serve participants such as Roman Shusterman and myself, among others, do take positions.

As far as I am able to recall, the last time the NPSC as a group took a position happened a couple of years ago when at a meeting ("faciliated" by then NPSC activist Joe Carranza) the group voted to endorse me as a candidate for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton.

It was at that meeting that the crypto-fascist (and apparent LaRouche-linked "government agent") Geoffrey Blank, tried to nullify the vote.

In fact the similarities between the egomaniacal Bloomberg and Blank are becoming more apparent by the day. Blank's "term limit", like that of his role model Saddam Hussein, is over.

Roman is correct in his references to Councilman Tony Avella and me. Mr. Avella (D- Queens) is a very long-shot candidate for mayor. Like myself, Mr. Avella is marginalized by the establishment media. In fact if it were not for the increasingly widely read UP FRONT News, few people in for example Staten Island would even know Avella is a candidate. That is because S.I. is victimized by the Staten Island Advance, which has to be the most censored paper in New York and, according to at least one very well known African-American activist in S.I., "the most racist paper in New York."

The Democratic mayoral primary will have Mr. Avella, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner, and NYC Controller William Thompson as candidates. Bloomberg flunkie City Council Speaker Christine, Quinn (who had planned to run for mayor) will instead run for a third term in the Council. Ms. Quinn is one of the most machiavellian people since Machiavelli. If someone defeats her, that will be a good thing for New York and America.

In the Democratic primary in 2005 I supported Mr. Weiner, who finished a surprisingly strong second to Fernando Ferrer. I endorsed Weiner in UP FRONT News. In fact, as I recall the only county Weiner won in the primary was Richmond County, otherwise known as Staten Island. UP FRONT News swings votes.

If the primary were today I would vote for Avella, who is the strongest human rights (e.g. tenants, taxpayers, Tibetans) advocate running.

I don't know much about the politics of William Thompson.

Anthony Weiner, who is a protege of the Charles Schumer political empire, is a superb debater. In a debate situation I think he would make Bloomberg look as bad as I have made Geoffrey Blank look.

Bloomberg's henchpeople include the pseudo-left, e.g. the LaRouche-linked racist Lenora Fulani. Bloomberg would never have been elected in 2001 were it not for this crypto-fascist princess, who, in her capacity at the time as dictator of the so-called Independence Party of New York, gave the IPNY ballot line to Bloomberg, which enabled Bloomberg to squeak by Democrat Mark Green. Fulani endorsed Bloomberg again in 2005, thereby helping him defeat Ferrer. Bloomberg repaid her with tax breaks for her front organization, the All Stars
Project.

Bloomberg also was helped by he Fulani-infiltrated Green Party of New York, which ran Tony Gronowicz for mayor simply to siphon votes away from the Democrats, replay opf the Nader strategy which helped elect Cheney/Bush in 2000. A key figure in that maneuver was noneother then Gerald Kann of the Green Party, who is known for his involvement in a physical assault upon me in 2004 perpetrated by his LaRouche/Fulani partner George Tatevosyan. As long as the Green Party has people like Gerald Kann in it's organization it has no political credibility whatsoever. These are among the reasons why it would be a mistake for anyone to vote for either Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney for President this year. A vote for Nader or McKinney is a vote for John McCain. A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for Barack Obama.

In any event, as far as term limits are concerned, the New York City government is making the government of Iraq look honest and competent by comparison. I'd suggest a term limit of three minutes.
* * * * * * *

CENSORSHIP AT THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE. HOW TOM WROBLESKI SKEWS AND CONTROLS THE NEWS.

UP FRONT News October 14, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomweissforuscongress.blogspot.com/
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/upfrontnewsdiscussionforum

CENSORSHIP AT THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE. HOW TOM WROBLESKI SKEWS AND CONTROLS THE NEWS. THE ADVANCE COVERS UP ITS COVERUPS BY EXCLUDING ME FROM THE CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE DEBATES.

By Tom Weiss

A few weeks ago at a meeting of SiColab, a Staten Island grass roots arts advocacy organi- zation, a filmmaker strongly criticized the Staten Island Advance for ignoring her calls for coverage and for the skimpy coverage of grass roots issues. Little did she know that she was making contact with the tip of an iceberg of censorship and slanted reporting at the Staten Island Advance.

Also present at the meeting was Ben Johnson, the music editor of the Advance's weekly entertainment magazine called "Awe." I could understand some defensiveness on his part as he acknowledged the lady's polite but very firm criticisms and then suggested that complaints should be directed to the Advance's Editor Brian Laline. Mr. Johnson needn't have bothered as it seems that directing a complaint about reporting or non-reporting to Mr. Laline is the equivalent of directing a complaint against Dick Cheney to George W. Bush.

The reality is that the Staten Island Advance, owned by the multibillionaire media mogul Donald Newhouse, is a corporate mouthpiece that regularly practices censorship, most clearly in its political coverage. The villain in the piece is a dour and dishonest man named Tom Wrobleski, who is the Political Editor of the Advance.

I first met Mr. Wrobleski in as I recall March of 2005, a few weeks after I had decided to run for the U.S. Senate against the very corporate Republicrat Hillary Clinton, who, among her many other negligences, is directly involved in the political and media coverup of the Genocide in Tibet. Mr. Wrobleski and I met for over an hour in his Borough Hall office. I answered all of his questions, provided him with the identities and contact information for sources about me and gave him a pile of news clippings about me from various newspapers and magazines over the years. When, at the interview, I asked him about coverage, he said, "let's see how your campaign goes." He asked me to stay in touch with him by telephone and e-mail. I did.

As I have said and written previously. If there were an Olympic gold medal for not answering messages and e-mails, Tom Wrobleski would be an easy winner.

All of that changed during a televised campaign debate in August, 2005 involving candidates for the office of NYC Public Advocate. One of those candidates was the incumbent Betsy Gotbaum, a person with whom, via a family member of mine, I've been personally acquainted since 1979. Betsy Gotbaum is a symbol of what is bad and corrupt about politics, particularly when ruled by rich and greedy people like her. My first experience with Betsy Gotbaum as Public Advocate occurred a number of years ago when I had an appointment with her then Chief of Staff Scott Coccaro to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers. Ms. Gotbaum responded by trying to have me arrested in her office. Fortunately the intelligence police officer assigned to the task proved to be far more intelligent and stable than Ms. Gotbaum handled the situation appropriately and, after asking me the right questions, merely advised me to return home and leave Gotbaum alone for awhile.

Ms. Gotbaum's anxieties about me relate directly to the fact that I'm a free lance investigative journalist and that she has a closetful of political skeletons including (at least) marital links to the Central Intelligence Agency and some adultery.

Under any circumstances, any reasonably competent psychiatrist evaluating Betsy Gotbaum should have no difficulty in including "paranoid" in his or her diagnostic assessment.

Because of Ms. Gotbaum's apparent unwillingness to do something about the rampant staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers, I decided to support civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel for Public Advocate. One day Mr. Siegel told me that he had received a Gotbaum complaint that I had been "stalking" her. In fact, as I told Mr. Siegel, I've never stalked anyone and but I have been present as a journalist at some events at which Gotbaum has appeared. Mr. Siegel and I had a chuckle about all that.

And so during the aforementioned 2005 debate, the very secretive Gotbaum was asked to reveal the contents of her Public Advocate appointment schedule. Perhaps with the Tom Weiss appointment in mind, she refused, stating that she was being stalked by a homeless individual. Thanks to what may be the one of the greediest landlords around, the very politically con- nected loftlord, Forest Hills, Queens resident Thomas Berger ("The Greed Merchant of Tribeca"), I was homeless for a time.

Upon reading the "stalker" comment in several newspapers I contacted the Daily News and very soon met with reporter Celeste Katz. Her story, which accurately reported my side of the Gotbaum "stalker" delusion, appeared in the Daily News on August 27, 2005. My side was also covered in a New York Times story on the same date by Jonathan Hicks.

Breaking that story, however was Dan Janison, then the City Hall reporter for Newsday. In his essentially accurate story on the Gotbaum fantasy and the Weiss rebuttal which appeared in NYC Newsday on August 26, he also reported my U.S. Senate candidacy.

It was at that point that Tom Wrobleski, who had written not one word about my Senate candidacy, contacted me asking me for an "exclusive." We did a telephone interview. His story, which appeared with a front page lead on August 27, was error-riddled and openly slanted in favor of Gotbaum (who, by the way, later and very secretively, apologized to me). He even gave State Senator Diane Savino, whose Chief of staff Robert Cataldo, almost physically attacked me in her office several years ago when I was there for a homelessness-related scheduled appointment, the opportunity to make a blatantly defamatory comment about me in print and gave the same opportunity to Keith Parascandola, a Chief of Staff who demonstrates why the New York State Legislature has been properly rated as "the worst in the country."

I complained to the Advance and was assured they would publish corrections. They lied. I was asked to write a letter to the editor. I wrote two. They refused to publish them and when I asked why, the response was a Tom Wrobleski/Dick Cheney-style silence.

And as far as "stalking" Betsy Gotbaum is concerned, I usually respond to that Gotbaum fantasy by a reference to a fine country song recorded by Dwight Yoakum titled "I Ain't That Lonely Yet."

Following Wrobleski's poorly written article he resumed his journalistic silence about my candidacy for the U.S. Senate. It is apparent that he regarded protecting Hillary Clinton as part of his job. I therefore wrote an article on my U.S. Senate campaign blog http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/ accusing the Staten Island Advance of censorship and referring to him as Tom Wrongleski. Not to long after that I had a telephone conversation with Advance editor Dean Balsamini. As we were talking he brought up my article on his computer and exclaimed, "You trashed my reporter." I reminded him that Mr. Wrobleski had been guilty of false reporting and censorship with regard to me and advised him that I felt free to write further critical articles about Wrobleski and the Advance.

It was not too long after that conversation that I received a call from Mr. Wrobleski asking for an interview. The interview was conducted by phone and resulted in a front page article in the Advance appearing on August 21, 2006 under the headline "With the stroke of a pencil vote for anyone." Mr. Wrobleski spent most of the article on the technicalities of write-in voting and very few words on my very serious issues with Hillary Clinton. He did mention that I have accused Mrs. Clinton of ignoring the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. And that makes the Staten Island Advance perhaps the only paper anwhere that mentions a genocide and doesn't follow up the story.

Some months ago an Advance reporter named Tevah Platt wrote a story about some civil rights work by Rev. Demetrius Carolina, Pastor of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton, of which I am a member. I sent her an e-mail commenting favorably about her article but advising her of the serious censorship problems at the Advance. To my surprise Ms. Platt replied with an e-mail expressing interest in my issues and also claiming that she would never work for a paper that practices censorship. (If she meant it, she will have to start looking for work elsewhere.) She referred me over to several editors, such as Marjorie Hack and they buried everything.

The Staten Island Advance knows full well that I can prove major negligences by Diane Savino, the really bad State Assemblyman Matthew Titone and City Councilman Michael McMahon. They know I have the facts and the paperwork on the Clintons' involvement in the coverup of the genocide in Tibet. They know that I have the facts about domestic fascism in NYC, including Staten Island (via the racist Lenora Fulani and the "Independence Party of New York" - and Fulani's ideological godfather, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.).

And now that I am a write-in candidate for the U.S. Congressman the Staten Island Advance is trying to shut me up again by singling me out for exclusion from the Advance-sponsored debates on October 15 and the 28th. the Advance is even covering up its coverups. (The October 28th debate is co-sponsored by the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce. Hopefully the Chamber of Commerce's President & CEO Linda M. Baran and it's Vice President Patrick Hyland have more respect for the first amendment and for the voters of the 13th congressional district and will see to it that I am included in the October 28th debate).

And so Ben Johnson might be interested to know that Brian Laline, who ignored a mountain of information provided him by me and my Communicatons Director Frank De Luca on the Wrobleski censorship, in a one line note apologized for excluding me from its debates and said that the Advance wants to confine itself to candidates whose names appear on the ballot. What that means that they favor candidates who are backed by political party machines.

One of the stories covered up by the Advance was the political blowout in the NYC City Council some months ago generated when the imperious Council Speaker Christine Quinn ("The Marie Antoinette of City Hall") sabotaged the effort to have several blocks of a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant now named for a slaveowner named Gates renamed in honor of the late and very controversal black nationalist Sonny Abubadika Carson. Among those who most vociferously denounced Carson, thereby disrespecting thousands of African-Americans, was Councilman Michael McMahon. I was in the Council chambers that day and I saw the whole thing.

Some months ago at a Sonny Carson-supporting rally in Brooklyn, a prominent Staten Island African-American activist, responding to my mention of the Staten Island Advance, said firmly, "The Staten Island Advance is the most racist paper in New York." As long as Tom Wrobleski runs things politically there, I cannot disagree.
* * * * * * *

CENSORSHIP AT THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE SPONSORED CONGRESSIONAL DEBATES

UP FRONT News October 11, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss and Frank Deluca

U.S. congressional candidate Tom Weiss and his supporters strongly object to an apparent decision as communicated by Staten Island Advance Political Editor Tom Wrobleski to exclude Mr. Weiss from two Advance-sponsored debates on October 15th and October 28th.

A number of people have already expressed their opposition to this censorship and have urged the Advance to include Mr. Weiss in the 13th congressional district debates. Several letters sent to Advance Editor Brian Leline are posted below.

You may fax addtional letters to Mr. Leline at 718-981-5679.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Laline, Editor 10/11/08
Staten Island Advance

Dear Mr. Laline,

I have been acquainted with Tom Weiss for over 4 years. We have participated in and have advocated for many causes together, including freedom of speech and assembly. I am a participant of a weekly free speech event at Union Square, which Tom has greatly contributed to and helped organize in the past few years. Aside from that I am also familiar with Tom’s previous activities, such as his advocacy for patients rights and outreach to the homeless regarding voter rights and education. I feel Tom is possibly the most legitimate candidate in the congressional race in the 13th congressional district, mainly because he has reached out to and has been there for people who needed him most. Tom is definitely not rich but he still finds ways to help and offer the little financial assistance that he can afford to help others less fortunate than him.

From spending time with Tom I have noticed that his helping people is not limited to any one person. If he met someone in need and befriended that person he was always willing to help in any way he could, whether it be with social work and information about government bureaucracies or by offering his own assistance. Tom has been around for a while and knows a lot about the legal system as well as the way our government operates. As a professional social worker he interacted with many people from different countries, as well as with the disadvantaged in our own midst who need the most assistance and compassion. There are no other candidates that have shown as much compassion and have the type of experience necessary to lead and inspire leadership within our communities and the country. Yes, Tom’s approach to politics is unorthodox, however it is this unorthodox approach that is necessary, especially in a “change” election like the one we are going through now. I realize that as an average citizen I have very little influence over the policies of your newspaper, and so I am not going to make any unreasonable demands on my own behalf. However, I am encouraging you to think about the good that can be accomplished by allowing people to know what their choices are in this election. I guarantee you that if your newspaper recognizes Tom and gives him the legitimacy he deserves, the people of S.I. as well as the country will view your paper in a completely different light and will be grateful for your safeguarding of democracy and liberty.

Under any circumstances it is my considered opinion that Tom Weiss is a serious and legitimate candidate for the United States Congress and that he should definitely be included in any Staten Island Advance - sponsered forums or debates among the candidates. I am urging you to include him in the October 15th and October 28th debates.

Thank you for your consideration and your early reply.

Sincerely,
Roman Shusterman
Coordinator, No Police State Coalition
c.c. Rev. Demetrius Carolina, First Central Baptist Church, S.I.
Rabbi Gerald Sussman, Temple Emanu-El, S.I.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Mr. Laline,

I am a local musician, who plays at local who has recently been made aware that Mr. Tom Weiss has not been allowed to debate with the other candidates who are runningfor the 13th Congressional District seat. I am appalled that a write in candidate is not allowed to take part in this debate. It simply goes to show that true democracy is in danger in this country. i encourage you to let Mr. Weiss debate. Let the voice of the grass roots be heard! Stop going along with the status quo and being a cog in the media machine that is the right hand of the corporate-ocracy that has infiltrated the countries political system. Despite any personal opinions you may or may not have for Mr. Weiss, his voice should be allowed and encouraged to be heard in any debates for the upcoming debate.

Sincerely,

Frank Paul Miello II
-----------------------------------------------------
Daer Mr. Laline:

I think that Mr. Tom Weiss should be allowed to present his case to be a congessman in Staten Island at the upcoming debates (October 15 and October 28)

Tom is one of the most well-spoken gentleman I know, and I also think that his ideas should be considered.

Besides, to exclude him is a form of censorship.

I look forward to your response by email.

Thank you.

Peace.

James Mansfield
305 West 28th Street#7G
NYC 10001
212-929-2268

WHY I AM RUNNING IN THE GENERAL ELECTION FOR THE U.S. CONGRESS IN THE 13TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT.

UP FRONT News August 25, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

When, after the August 24 service at the First Central Baptist Church in Staten Island, I told FCBC Rev. Demetrius Carolina that I am planning to run for the U.S. Congress as a Democratic write-in candidate in the 13th congressional district, he smiled, shook my hand and said, "I love it." While I am not taking his very positive reaction as an endorsement of what will be an uphill race against the very politically entrenched City Councilman Michael McMahon, as well as Republican and Independence Party candidates, I am very glad to receive the encouragement of perhaps Staten Island's most outspoken civil rights leader.

And if he ends up as a citizen supporting my candidacy it will not necessarily be because I am a member of his very community and human rights-conscious church; it will be because he sees me as the most human rights-oriented candidate for the U.S. Congess in the 13th congressional district, which includes all of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn.

The incumbent congressman, Republican Vito Fossella, is going into political retirement as a direct result of his getting arrested last May while driving drunk on the way to his lover's house in Virginia. In Fossella's case the irony and hypocrisy involved are more apparent than in the case of let's say the even less monogamous Bill Clinton, Fossella having often pontificated about "family values" and other "conservative" virtues.

Within a few political moments of Fossella's downfall (as rapid as those previously of Elliot Spitzer and subsequently John Edwards) Councilman McMahon, who had been openly planning to run for the Borough Presidency of Staten Island, announced his candidacy for congress.

That announcement was soon followed up by expressions of support from various figures in the big money Democratic political establishment such as Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton as well as some union endorsements. In a move the surprised absolutely no one, State Senator Diane Savino, an important cog in the almost lily-white Democratic Party machine that runs the North Shore of Staten Island Carmine de Sapio-style, a politician who employs a seriously anger management-challenged hack named Robert Cataldo as her Chief of Staff, has endorsed McMahon.

As a steadily increasing number of Staten Islanders, who do not depend for their news on the establishment-protecting multi-billionaire (Donald Newhouse)-owned Staten Island Advance, perhaps New York's most politically "controlled" paper, are aware, Councilman McMahon has engaged in at least one very serious act of politically motivated negligence.

It is the job of an elected official to represent all his or her clients, regardless of political views. Mr. McMahon, however, operates by a different standard, and in fact in December, 2006, refused to assist me on a number of very serious problems involving abuses against me by several government agencies. Indeed, my attorney at the time, Jacob J. Goodman, who has since passed away, who provided some legal advice and assistance on these matters, urged me to obtain assistance from my elected officials. Mr. Goodman obviously did not understand the corrupt political machine in power in Staten Island, ruled colony-style by politicians from Manhattan (City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg) and Westchester (Hillary Clinton).

The details of the games played by Diane Savino and State Assemblyman Matthew Titone (who may be the worst state legislator in what has been correctly labeled "the worst state legislature in the country") are described in UP FRONT News. You will not find a syllable in the very politically censored Advance (known to many as the Staten Island Retreat).

Indeed when I ran as a Democratic write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton, the Advance suppressed that story for months. My name finally got into the paper after the seriously paranoid and CIA-linked NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum - with whom via a family member of mine, I've been personally acquainted since 1979 - claimed during a televised campaign debate that I was "stalking" her. My rebuttal to Gotbaum's totally false defamation (for which she later very privately apologized) first appeared in NYC Newsday on August 26, 2005, in an article which also reported my candidacy for the U.S. Senate against Mrs. Clinton. Generally accurate stories appeared in the Daily News and The New York Times on August 27.

Tom Wrobleski's error-riddled slanted story on the Gotbaum vs. Weiss dispute appeared with a front page lead in the Advance on August 27. The Advance reneged on its offer to print corrections. And they refused to print my letters to thre editor which they suggested I write.

Gotbaam's "stalker" fantasy cames as a result of my being present as a reporter at various public events as which Gotbaum spoke. And as far as "stalking" Betsy Gotbaum is concerned, my punch line is always the same, i.e. a reference to a country song recorded by Dwight Yoakum titled "I Ain't That Lonely Yet."

And is was only after I wrote an article on my U.S. Senate campaign blog at http://www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com/ accusing the Advance of censorship and inaccurate reporting that Mr. Wrobleski was induced to interview me again and write an article about my U.S. Senate candidacy that appeared on the front page on August 21, 2006.

Councilman McMahon, after verbally promising to assist me with my serious problems in- volving several government agencies, changed his mind after he read an UP FRONT News article criticizing his political boss Quinn (aka the Marie Antoinette of NYC politics), for her refusal to respond to my polite face-to-face and e-mailed urgings that she sponsor a City Council resolution citing the racist Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet and calling for the removal of the 2008 Olympic Games from Beijing. (City Councilman Tony Avella, a Democrat from Queens, and a candidate for mayor, did, at my behest, introduce a resolution - #1299 - along those lines which died thanks in part to lack of support from the powerful and autocratic Quinn.)

McMahon, in an angry December, 2006 e-mail to me, expressed his resentment that I had criticized Quinn and then showed his further ignorance of his responsibilities as a City Coun-cilman by declaring that for the City Council to express views on "international issues" was a "waste of time." Perhaps that would explain why the Council in 2001 unanimously passed (with Quinn ripping off the credit from another Councilmember) resolution #802 (my idea)
which denounced Communist China for its atrocities in Tibet. That resolution, however, had minimal impact because it made no mention of the Olympic Games issue, the big money issue.

Perhaps Councilman McMahon would like to explain, if it is a "waste of time" for the Council to address "international issues", why he voted some years ago in favor of a pro-Iraq War resolution.

Mike McMahon, who will go around claiming to be a labor advocate, might be experiencing some sibling-related discomfort over his lobbyist brother Tom McMahon's services to the Arker Domain Corporation, accused of Walmart-style anti-labor practices at the publicly funded construction project at Markham Gardens.

Under any circumstances, I know I have a stronger union background than certainly any candidate for congress in the 13th CD, having been an elected shop steward in Local 1199, District Council 37, and District Council 1707 during the years when I was a social worker.

Michael McMahon is, in a manner of speaking, being challenged for the Democratic nomination by "peace candidate" Steve Harrison, a lawyer from Brooklyn. Harrison ran against Fossella in 2006 and, in a solidly Democratic year, lost decisively to the Republican.

Mr. Harrison, who has shown hesitating interest in my very serious issues with McMahon even to the point of agreeing to hold a press conference on the matter but not being able to commit to a date, is approaching the primary race much in the way that John Kerry took on George Bush, weakly. Harrison's campaign organization is heavily influenced by some ultra-left types like the occasionally threatening David Jones of the marginal Peace Action of Staten Island, which features self-described "anarchist" Mike May, a guy with links to a full-fledged Lyndon LaRouche-oriented neo-fascist and criminal Geoffrey Blank. All indications are that Steve Harrison, who thinks that talking and talking about Iraq will beat Mike McMahon, will be decisively defeated in the Democratic primary.

There is no way I will vote for Mike McMahon - and not too long after he opened a campaign office very near my home in Stapleton on August 24 I politely told Mr. McMahon so personally. At the very least, Mike McMahon owes me a written apology for his December, 2006 refusal to assist me and a promise that he will assist me from now on, at least in his capacity as my City Councilman.

As I left church on Sunday on my way to McMahon's Stapleton office (and then to man- hattan), FCBC churchmember Marilyn Averett, as she is recurrently in the habit of doing, pulled me aside and sort of admonished me to behave with McMahon, as she was heading in the same direction. I told her that McMahon is the one who has disrespected me and I gave her a carefully graphic description of one such instance.

Ms. Averett is a member of Staten Island Community Board 1 (as is the sometimes hot-headed First Central Baptist Church member Larry Beslow), and is thereby the beneficiary of a political gift bestowed by Councilman McMahon - and, only a little less directly, by Michael Bloomberg, who controls the CB's in the name of the big real estate developers and gentrifiers who want to convert "downtown" Staten Island, including working class Stapleton, into another Soho.

When I told Ms. Averett of my intention to run against McMahon, in part because of his arrogance in speaking and voting against a City Council bill that would have changed the name of a few blocks of a Brooklyn Street to honor the late and controversial black nationalist Sonny Abubadika Carson, she replied with a saying about "staying close to one's friends but closer to one's enemies." That seemed to be her rationalization for perhaps voting for McMahon (although I doubt he would appreciate the "enemy" reference). The logical electoral extension to that interpretation of the "closer to one's enemies" saying, would suggest that a Jew in the 1930's could cast a ballot for Hitler or that a Tibetan would vote for Mao Zedong or that an African-American would vote for Strom Thurmond.

In any event, it is clear to me that none of the candidates for congress in the 13th congressional district is ready to make his priority human rights and integrity in office. My platform, which will be released soon, will make that clear.

Vote for me.
* * * * * * *

MESSAGE TO MIKE McMAHON, ET. AL. DO NOT IGNORE WRITE-IN CANDIDATES.

UP FRONT News September 8, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss, Publisher - UP FRONT News and Write-in
candidate for U.S. Congress, 13th congressional district.

Write-in candidate wins primary in California - and the machine cracks down.
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Entrenched machine politicians, such as Michael McMahon, the Republicrat City Councilman from Staten Island, seeking to become the congressman representing the 13th congressional district, need to take write-in candidates, of which I am one, running for the same the monied McMahon seeks to purchase, very seriously. I expect to face all post-September 9 primary candidates, Democratic (McMahon), Republican, and "Independence Party of New York" in the November 4 general election. I am ready to debate with all.

And for those interested in very long shots taking on the party machines, google "Michael Sessions", the young man some years ago, fed up with major party machine control of his town of Hillsdale, Michigan, who ran for mayor as write-in and won.

And as far as Mike McMahon is concerned, it was most enlightening at the September 7 11:00 AM service at the largely African-American First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton (of which I am a member) to experience Mr. McMahon's impersonation of a civil rights-conscious peace candidate. In his spirited effort to win the New York City Political Chameleon of the Year Award, McMahon expressed opposition to the Iraq War, stating (as if the congrega- tion didn't know) that many of the soldiers killed in Iraq are people of color.

Mike McMahon, who has always marched to the beat of Chief Chameleon Hillary Clinton's drum (e.g. actively opposing Barack Obama until he had no other choice), neglected to mention his pro-Iraq War vote in the New York City Council.

Perhaps at his next visit to FCBC - and/or in a debate with me - Mr. McMahon will explain his vociferous opposition in the City Council to the renaming of a few blocks of a Bedford-Stuyvesant street (now named for a slaveowner named Gates) after the late black nationalist/community activist Sonny Abubadika Carson.

Maybe McMahon will also explain how he could vote for a pro-Iraq War resolution in the City Council and than a few years later, refuse to support a Councilman Tony Avella (D.-Queens)-introduced resolution citing the Chinese Communist racist Genocide in Tibet and opposing the Beijing Olympics by claiming, in his angry December, 2006 e-mail to me that for the City Council to vote on "international" issues" is a "waste of time."

Like I said, Mike McMahon is a member of the Chameleon Party.
* * * * * * *
For more information on my campaign please visit: http://www.tomweissforuscongress.blogspot.com/
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California Write-In Candidate Wins Primary, Denied Place On General Election Ballot
Posted in July 15th, 2008
http://foolocracy.com/2008/07/california-write-in-candidate-wins-primary-denied-place-on-general-election-ballot/
by Glenn Church in Abel Maldonado, California, Dennis Morris
When Democrat Dennis Morris learned that no Democrats were running against Republican state Senator Abel Maldonado, Morris decided to run.

The filing period to get on the primary ballot had expired in California, but Morris announced his candidacy as a write-in. Senator Maldonado, sensing he might cut-off his opponent, also announced he would run in the Democratic primary as a write-in. Maldonado announced he wanted to give his mother, a democrat, an opportunity to vote for him.

California law states that a write-in candidate must get 1% of the total for that office in the last general election. For the 15th State Senate District the necessary number is 3,689 votes. Morris got 2096. Maldonado received 533 votes, including his mother.

This leaves everything cut and dry. Morris barely received half the required amount. Except Morris read a bit further into the election code and found a section that conflicted with the 1% requirement.

The election code also reads: political party shall not be denied the ability to place on the general election ballot the candidate who received, at the primary election, the highest vote among that party candidates.
Solution: lawsuit.

When the courts are faced with two equally opposing sections in electoral law, they generally support the one that gives voters a wider choice. Expect Morris on the November ballot. Maldonado should be happy also. It gives his mother another chance to vote for him.

GRASS ROOTS NO COVER CHARGE PERFORMING ARTS ALIVE IN STATEN ISLAND.

UP FRONT News September 11, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

GRASS ROOTS NO COVER CHARGE PERFORMING ARTS ALIVE IN STATEN ISLAND. OPEN MICS, SICOLAB, AND THE FIRST CENTRAL BAPTIST CHURCH - AND KEEPING STAPLETON, ETC. GENTRIFICATION-FREE.

By Tom Weiss

I am one of what may be a small group of people who have lived in all five boroughs of New York City; I now live in the no longer "hidden" borough of Staten Island. And, while I think much of the Democratic and Republican machine-dominated politics in S.I. needs to be cleaned up (which is a major reason why, although I am a registered Democrat, I am running as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Congress in the now very visible 13th congres- sional district, which includes all of S.I. and parts of Brooklyn), when it comes to the arts and other phenomena, Staten Island is a breath of fresh air. (And I have lived in lofts in the artsy neighborhoods of Soho, Noho and Tribeca, now among New York's most over-developed and gentrified communities.)

For sure, another reason I am running for Congress is to empower those of us who will resist the real estate developer power-and-money grab which has the North Shore of Staten Island, in particular my working class ethnically diverse neighborhood of Stapleton, in its crosshairs. I live a few feet from the vast acreage of the Homeport, the naval base that becomes a tourist attraction every year during Fleet Week. The Homeport and the adjacent streets have the predatory developers and their (I choose the possessive "their" intentionally) politicians, e.g. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, City Councilman Michael McMahon (the Democratic Party machine candidate for Congress) interested in their glitzy "Downtown Staten Island Plan." The plan, which was presented at a Democratic club meeting in Westerleigh some weeks ago by the not very grass roots "Downtown Staten Island Council", would, if implemented, lead immediately to increased homelessness in Staten Island. These geniuses seek for example to eliminate an entire block of businesses and residences (including mine) along Stapleton's (S.I.) Canal Street (and, in case Manhattan is interested, there is a Canal Street in the South Bronx) to create a "greenway" to the Homeport. Bloomberg talks environmental "green" but he rules in the interest of cash green. My answer to that idea: Hands off Canal Street!!! Even if the Quinnberg/McMahon-controlled Staten Island Community Board 1 remains silent.

And I think I will have the support not only of my Canal Street neighbors but of an increasingly politically visible civil rights leader, Rev. Demetrius Carolina, the Martin Luther King follower who is the pastor of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton, of which I am a member. Rev. Carolina, who has already introduced me as a congressional candidate at a recent forum (for later soundly primary-defeated Democrat Steve Harrison), is, aside from myself, among the first to raise "gentrification" as a major political issue in Staten Island. Rev. Carolina doesn't only read the Bible; he also reads UP FRONT News.

Rev. Carolina is also an arts engine, as services at FCBC are full of performance art, mostly gospel music and dance. And last spring, with his family, he walked around the corner from the church to The Cup - a combination coffeehouse/nightclub that is a major performing arts venue and gallery well known not only for "major artist" events but also for poetry and music open mics - and read several of his poems at an "UP FRONT News presents" event earlier this year.

Staten Island is certainly a center of the small "d" democratic "open mic" tradition. The Cup has regular open mic events on Mondays and also the first Thursday of the month "Come Vibe with Us." There are open mics at The Everything Goes Bookstore Cafe and a weekly one (Mondays) at a Stapleton bar called Martini Red. The Martini Red event runs by Lower Manhattan time standards, generally casually starting after 10:00 PM and - because music- ian performers are allowed up to three songs, which can be a long time - sometimes don't wind up until 3:00 AM. There is no question, however, that they are entertaining. I enjoy reading my poetry there and, unless it gets too late, I also enjoy performers like guitarist Paul Strayfer and singers such as Frank Giallombardo and Jaclyn Shaw, among others. To be sure the First Amendment is put to the test by "Terrible Tim", who can expect banishment not only at houses of worship but in any venue that has children present. He would also not be appreciated at a feminist event. He is good with rhyme and I think his verse would sound better if he more carefully tuned his guitar.

I've produced two UP FRONT News presents events at The Cup which have featured performers including two of the greats of rock 'n' roll and the blues, singer Joy Ryder accompanied by guitarist Michael Packer, both known around the world and both residents of Staten Island. David Peel, for a time a musical colleague of John Lennon, at my invitation, performed at a Cup open mic.

Also featured at UP FRONT News events at the Cup and elsewhere (which always include an open mic), aside from Paul Strayfer and Jaclyn Shaw, have been poet Jack Freedman, story-writer Maria Loginova, poets Jackie Cassen, Eric Hines, Pia Garber, Henry Dennis, Ellen Aug-Lytle (Manhattan) Jeniene Lilly (Bronx), Evie Ivy (Brooklyn), Robert Dunn (Queens), Piedad Guzman (Manhattan), Jim Feast, Bruce Weber (both Brooklyn) and others. Open mic performers have included Staten Islanders such as singers Frank Giallombardo and Jennifer Sprosty and classical pianist former Queens resident Peter Schultheis, poet Adrianna Goffredo and comedienne Mary Dimino.

A few weeks ago I received a call from an art activist named Nima Beckie who invited me to a meeting of "SIcoLab" (Staten Island Collaboration). In fact SIcoLab is generationally beyond the "under 40" reported in the Staten Island Advance. SIcoLab (which has some membership overlap with the Council on Arts & Humanities for Staten Island - COAHSI) , however, is clearly a steadily increasing-in-size network of artists, including writers, painters, photographers, musicians, dancers, etc., focusing on grass roots creativity - the kind of thing perhaps missing in the new Tribeca, and probably on Sutton Place.

SIcoLab had a "Homeless Art Gallery" exhibit in Silver Lake Park last July, a concert/party at Gallery6 in Stapleton after Hurricane Hannah left town and is sponsoring an all day "art happening" event called "Bridge the Gap" on September 20 at Alice Austen House Museum at 2 Hylan Boulevard in the Rosebank neighborhood in Staten Island, which will include an open mic. Many of the SIcoLab participants are from Staten Island's North Shore and the event is in part intended to bridge whatever "gap" there may be with Mid-Island and South Shore.

And in what may be something of a NYC dwindling tradition being kept alive in the arts in Staten Island, there is no cover charge. Not even for the "bridge and ferry crowd."
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THE BIG ISSUES IN NEW YORK CITY: GENTRIFICATION, OVER-DEVELOPMENT AND THE HOUSING CRISIS.

UP FRONT News August 19, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

THE BIG ISSUES IN NEW YORK CITY: GENTRIFICATION, OVER-DEVELOPMENT AND THE HOUSING CRISIS. THE LOWER EAST SIDE IS GROUND ZERO AND STATEN ISLAND'S STAPLETON IS GROUND ONE. WE ARE ALL,IN THIS TOGETHER AND IT IS TIME FOR THE INNER-DIRECTED LOWER EAST SIDE TO REACH OUT.

By Tom Weiss

While gentrification and over-development are worsening the housing crisis and afflicting working class communities throughout New York City, Ground Zero may be the real estate goldmine known as Lower Manhattan. Made up of communities including the Lower East Side, the Greenwich Village, Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho and Tribeca, affordable housing in those communities, except for those surviving in rent-protected apartments (and lofts), is a thing of the past. What New Yorkers get under the Michael Bloomberg/Christine regime is what we least need, luxury housing! When I lived in a loft in Tribeca from 1977 until I was displaced in 1993 by one of the most avaricious, politically connected (and Orthodox) landlords (Thomas Berger) since the Old Testament, that neighborhood was working class in character. Thanks to a wave of over-development and gentrification, and the perfidies of the totally Mike McKee and Chuck Delaney-co-opted Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants, many loft tenants lost our homes. Tribeca has been Robert de Niro-ized and is now one of the richest neighborhoods in the world. People like poetry mogul and elitist-leftist Bob Holman are among those who occupy the Tribeca luxury lofts, the eastern urban equivalent to Beverly Hills. And as far as I am aware there is no Section 8 in Soho. The Lower East Side/East Village/Chinatown areas have for years been a focal point in the developer/tenant wars. Although twenty years ago the focus was on the homeless living in Tompkins Square Park, the police riot against the homeless, squatters and others in that community reverberated far beyond the homeless and made front page news for days. Loopholes (thank you Mike McKee) in rent protection laws have opened the way for greedy landlords like the Ekonomakis family to bully rent protected tenants such as those facing "owner occupancy" eviction at 47 East 3rd St. Huge real estate conglomerates such as the Bush/oil mogul-connected Carlyle Group are buying up properties there. NYU, the higher education equivalent of Russia under Vladimir Putin, is hoping to convert at least some of the neighborhood into a sort of captive nation. A corollary of over-development and gentrification - which are aided and abetted by politicians such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, et. al. -, is rampant bar proliferation of which Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side is perhaps the most conspicuous example. In a classic attempt at conquering by dividing, Bloomberg & Co. have designed a rezoning plan which provides some protection to the Lower East Side and the East Village at the expense of Chinatown. One of the battlegrounds of all this has been Manhattan Community Board 3. I have attended and testified at a number of CB3 meetings. Rhetorically speaking it is certainly class war. Among the more eloquent and convincing voices against gentrification, over-development and bar proliferation is musician/activist Rebecca Moore, who lives in the heart of the LES. There are plenty of others who speak out at Community Board meetings, legislative hearings, rallies, etc. They include John Penley, Rob Hollander, Monte Schapiro (constantly facing down his landlord Ben Shaoul) and Lower East Side music legend David Peel - who has offended some in the neighborhood with his musical use of the term "yuppie" (even applying it to older people) in connection with slimy stuff floating on swamp surfaces. There are perhaps, on a percentage basis, more activists on the Lower East Side than any other neighborhood in New York, "liberal" or otherwise. And yet the steadily gentrifying neighborhood is losing the battle. All one needs to do is walk through the once low rise-bordered streets of the Lower East Side, and its main thoroughfare East Houston Street and to check out the glass houses from which residents should not throw stones. The Lower East Side is starting to look like White Plains, a center of sterile corporate architecture. As far as I am able to determine, one of the political and organizational essentials that the talent-laden Lower East Side is not good at is reaching out and doing mutual support with other communities. In certain ways the Lower East Side is too inner-directed. As far as I am concerned, people like the recurrently protesting Rebecca Moore (who led a protest against the Varvatos elitist priced boutique, which replaced the displaced and deceased CBGB's) and others should be heard in other affected neighborhoods. I am not aware of much in the way of reaching out by just about any Lower East Side activist to other communities. Tenants rights activists in for example Brooklyn and Queens are much better at that. That may explain why perhaps the two most tenant rights-oriented members of the New York City Council are Tony Avella from Queens and Charles Barron from Brooklyn. (And if Avella is elected mayor in 2009 as he hopes and if Barron is elected Borough President of Brooklyn as he plans, there will be changes.) I live in the very gentrification and over-development-threatened ethnically diverse working class community of Stapleton on the North Shore of Staten Island, an area very much in the crosshairs of the developer-predators. Bloomberg, the machine Democratic City Councilman Michael McMahon, and moneymen and women are hoping to transform downtown Staten Island, which includes Stapleton and its real estate-undeveloped "Homeport", very near my home, into another Lower Manhattan-style "green" luxury district. It's nothing other than Soho-ization and economic ethnic cleansing. Staten Island Community Board 1, like all the CB's, has its voices of dissent but is run by the Bloomberg/Quinn/McMahon machine. Democratic City Council candidates (to replace the mercifully term-limited McMahon, who wants to be a congressman) Rev. Tony Baker and activist Debi Rose have had little to say on the gentrification/over-development issue. I am, however glad to report that Rev. Demetrius Carolina, the very influential Pastor of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton, of which I am a member, ex-pressed his concern about "gentrification" in a recent sermon. Rev. Carolina is a regular reader of UP FRONT News. Two members of his church are also members of Staten Island Community Board 1 and, at least as far as I am aware, have been essentially silent on that issue. Indeed one of those members became enraged at me a few months ago at a "peace" event at FCBC because I said something critical about Bloomberg, a savvy politician who has personally reached out to Rev. Carolina.

I've gone to a lot of LES protests, etc. including some recent ones in support of the 47 East 3rd St. tenants. I am glad that the president of the 47 East 3rd St. tenants association, recognizing that they have been victimized by a legislative loophole, has replied positively to my e-mail urging that we work together to get the New York State legislature to pass a law closing the "owner occupancy" loophole. And, while we're at it, we need to pass a law along the lines of the Mike McKee-murdered Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act, which would require any landlord or landlady seeking a rent increase for any reason to open his or her books to prove need. To do all that and to save neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side and Stapleton from real estate extinction, we will all have to work together. Some cliches have relevance, such as the one which reminds us that if we don't hang together we will surely hang separately.
* * * * * * *

VIOLENCE, RACISM (AND INCOMPETENCE) AT WORKFORCE1 IN STATEN ISLAND.

UP FRONT News July 18, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

Allen Dawson is a racist thug from Staten Island who doubles as a job-seeking client of Workforce1 in Staten Island. He and his collaborator, client Olga Gordon, have, on multiple occasions, whispered clearly ethnic slurs at me and, in Dawson's case, followed it up with explicit threats of violence, on of which was witnessed by Vincent Savoca, a formerly Sottile-employed security guard at Workforce1. Dawson has also threatened me on the street (three times on Bay Street Staten Island and once in Greenwich Village in Manhattan).

Workforce1 is a privately (Arbor Education & Training) run agency that contracts with the City of New York (NYC Department of Small Business Services) and the U.S. Department of Labor to provide employment and training services. As an internet-dependent free lance journalist, I have been a client at the Workforce1 Center at 60 Bay Street in Staten Island for months, regularly using primarily the first floor computer resource room.

As far as I am aware the Arbor-employed director at Workforce1 is Robin Johnson, whose office, significantly, is on the second floor. Ms. Johnson, who has covered up the multiple abuses against me, is without question one of the most inept and dishonest administrators I have ever encountered. And I speak as a former director of a social work department. Ms. Johnson is also living proof that, even though we still live in a class-based racially segregated society, racism is ironically interracial. Allen Dawson and Olga Gordon are black and former Chicagoan Johnson is white.

A major racist ingredient in this situtation, which is known to the NYPD and is being inves- tigated by Office of Deputy Mayor Bob Lieber, is a perhaps 280 lb sadistic character named Anthony McCarthy, who practices what might be called racial "McCarthyism." McCarthy, an African-American, is the Sottile-employed security guard who to my knowledge has been at Workforce1 in Staten Island for several months. McCarthy is acquainted with the racists Allen Dawson and Olga Gordon. He sees his role in terms similar to those used by guards in Nazi concentration camps. His role is to blame and persecute the victim.

On a number of occasions when McCarthy willfully mishandled Dawson's and/or Martin's abuses against me, I was able to obtain assistance from the then Arbor-employed Staten Island Workforce1 Strategic Operations Coordinator Biguita Hernandez, who has since left the agency and now, interestingly, works for the aforementioned NYC Department of Small Business Services. Ms. Hernandez' office was on the first floor and she in fact often served as the second in command at an agency where Ms. Johnson's absentee landlord-style of administration repeatedly generated serious breakdowns in service and other chaos. (In fact, for example for several days the computer printer was useless because it needed new toner and no one knew where Ms. Johnson had hidden the supply closet key. Indeed, Ms. Hernandez, who later located the key, sent me a nice e-mail thanking me for bringing the problem to her attention. For days clients had to circulate resumes on colored photocopy paper because of the Robin Johnson-caused absence of white paper. Ms. Johnson should be George W. Bush's next choice to run FEMA).

On June 12, the day before Ms. Hernandez' scheduled departure from Workforce, she was not at her desk in the morning. I arrived at the entrance door at about 8:55 AM. At around 9:07 McCarthy lumbered to the door, unlocked it and made certain to let it fall on me. I en-
tered and placed my belongings on a computer chair. I then returned to the McCarthy-run
sign-in area at the reception desk where a line had formed. McCarthy ordered me to cut in line and sign in. Since such a step would have inevitably led to an argument, grounds for at least a one day expulsion, no matter who is at fault, I refused. He repeated his order and I told him that I would get at the end of the line and sign in. When he repeated his demand again and began advancing in my direction, citing the absolute fact that I was feeling some discomfort from an injury I had sustained at home earlier that morning, I said that I would first go to the bathroom and then sign in.

Anthony McCarthy, who, despite his apparent age, may have been trained at Auschwitz, moved further in my direction, told me I couldn't go to the bathroom and said that he was
calling the police. At that point Arbor staffer Sal Fuentes, whom I have dubbed the person
with perhaps the worst manners in Staten Island (I think he is a racist), emerged from his office and told McCarthy to go ahead and call the cops.

They needn't have bothered because I called the NYPD. That was a very reasonable thing to do because, with the assistance of Sgt. Al Fiore of the NYPD's Intelligence Division (whom I first met some years ago when the severely paranoid and maritally CIA-linked NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, with whom, via a family member of mine, I've been acquainted since 1979, tried to have me arrested at her office when I was there to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters) I have filed a criminal complaint (#6401) against Dawson and Gordon.

Sgt. Fiore is also interested in Anthony McCarthy and has not received a return call from the Sottile Corporation, which employs the sadist McCarthy and has placed him at Workforce1 in Staten Island. Indeed Sgt. Fiore on his own traveled to Staten Island and had a very unsatisfactory meeting with Ms. Johnson, who aside from her other offenses, is now guilty of a potentially very serious one in lying (about me) to a police officer.

Not too long ago McCarthy (who once called the police when I talked to a client named Danielle McClain whom he had been bothering to the point where she was near tears) made a veiled threat of possible consequences to me should I return to Workforce1. At considerable internet cafe expense to myself I have stayed away for the time being. But, as Gen. McArthur once said, "I shall return" - and he did.

In the meantime I have telephone informed Arbor CEO Paul Dunn at his office in Texas that he has a serious problem named Robin Johnson of which he needs to rid himself. Arbor has been the subject in the past of one very critical article in the Daily News.

I have also made a formal complaint to the NYC Department of Small Business Services, which itself was the subject of a very unflattering article by Wayne Barrett a few weeks ago in the Village Voice.

Since I've gotten little in the way of a response from SBS I contacted the Office of Deputy Mayor Lieber, who has administrative responsibility for SBS. I spoke at some length by telephone with his Senior Policy Advisor, Nnenna Lynch, who asked me to formalize my complaint with an e-mail to her. She received my e-mail on July 11.

Complaints as needed will go to all relevant government and private human rights and con- sumer complaints groups.

There is general agreement that racism is alive - if not well - in America. There is no question that much of the racism is anti-Semitic in nature. Some of that has been fed by people such as the Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.-connected African-American racist Lenora Fulani. That association of course makes nice Jewish boys and men like Michael Bloomberg very uncomfortable because, even as she spouts pseudo-populist black nationalism, she had the Independence Party of New York, of which she was the dictator, give Bloomberg the IPNY ballot line which enabled him to squeeze by Democrat Mark Green to win the mayoralty in 2001. Fulani endorsed Bloomberg again in 2005. The Mayor has responded by helping her and her mentor, the Jewish racist and cult leader and LaRouche ideologue "Dr." Fred Newman, get large Industrial Development Agency tax breaks for their front organizations known as the All Stars Project (Fulani) and the Castillo Center (Newman).

Perhaps in part because some in my family did not survive the Holocaust I am more sensitive than some others to any sort of racism.

As a great many people know I am a member of the largely African-American First Central Baptist Church in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. The eloquent pastor Rev. Demetrius Carolina, a major civil rights leader in Staten Island and beyond, and I are friends.
A number of FCBC members are Workforce1 clients. I have asked them and I am asking all FCBC members, not to speak of the general community, to refrain from using Workforce1 at least in Staten Island, at least until my rights as a client are fully restored. As far as I am aware, only one FCBC member has expressed any objection to my request. Church regular Lillian Rodriguez, quite abruptly interrupted me as I was briefly describing the situation at Workforce1 to her, declared "I have to go there", and walked away. In fact, there are plenty of places, no doubt much better run, where Ms. Rodriguez and anyone else can go for employment and/or training.

The bottom line here is that there is racism at Workforce1 in Staten Island and the place should be boycotted. There's no point in waiting until some like the violent Dawson, now very well known to the NYPD and elsewhere, decides to integrate the message of the KKK and burn a cross on Staten Island.
* * * * * * *

THE UNION SQUARE SPEAKOUT-RELATED FILM PAYMENTS: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

UP FRONT News September 11, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

THE UNION SQUARE SPEAKOUT-RELATED FILM PAYMENTS: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. GEOFFREY BLANK REDUX? RICHIE DEGEN: AN "ANARCHIST" HEDGE FUND?

By Tom Weiss

It is no surprise that addictively self-proclaimed "anarchist" Richie Degen recurrrently hangs out on Saturday afternoons socializing with Holocaust-denying neo-nazis like Andy Kellerman, the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs-employed Jew hater who parades as a "Palestinian rights" advocate at the pathetic mini-Nuremberg protests on the traffic island at 14th Street and Broadway next to Union Square in Manhattan. (Just in case there is any doubt about the explosive Kellerman's views, during something of a confrontation with me some months ago - in which Kellerman became so enraged that he physically threatened me and chased me into the street - he once told me that there is no evidence that the Holocaust ever occured. He told me that the Jews made up the whole story. On a later occasion, the squeaky-voiced local Hitler-LaRouche wannabe told me that, if there was a Holocaust, "I don't care." Why the otherwise generally rational Green Party guy Bob Nash sometimes still participates in these depressing demonstrations, which include a handful of Geoffrey Blank-Fred Newman-style self-hating Jews, I do not know.

Richie Degen, while spouting a semi-coherent blend of leftism, populism, and black militance (Degen is as black as, say, David Duke) often sticks in some of his visceral xenophobia and racism. He regularly openly refers to Barack Obama as an "oreo." (That might make Degen the equivalent of melba toast.) Degen, unquestionably one of the most voluntarily unemployed and homeless people I have ever encountered, has been known to blame his chronic joblessness on illegal aliens. He was really out of place some weeks ago trying to spread his lumpenproletariat version of anarchism at an immigrants right rally un Union Square.

It seems that Richie Degen is now a profiteering thief, appropriating monies for himself that may very well rightfully be turned over to the nameless group that for several months has been organizing and sustaining the Thursday and Sunday afternoon and evening speakouts in Union Square.

For several years a leaderless group known as the No Police State Coalition - which despite its law enforcement-focused name, is essentially a network of free speech activists of a wide range of political and economic ideologists - held speakouts in Union Square. Those speakouts, started after 9/11 by activists such as Dennis Griggs, for some time also involuntarily featured some jihad-spewing neo-fascists parading as anti-Bush peace advocates, most conspicuously the violent and psychopathic Geoffrey Blank, aided and abetted by his 30+ year old baby brother Jason and (erstwhile?) Blank supporter Joel Meyers. Blank would stand in Union Square, appropriate the bullhorn for himself, preach the virtues of "free speech" under his obnoxious "Defend Geoffrey Blank" banner and proceed to threaten those, in particular me, who sought to express differing views. He would also solicit money in the name of the No Police State Coalition and keep the money for himself. Blank was, among is numerous other vices, an embezzler. Blank also felt that he could confront what he called police harassment by referring to the NYPD in barnyard terms. Geoffrey Blank was and is at least an ideological agent for the convicted felon, megalomaniac and racist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., who is busily again infiltrating the left via "third party" racists such as the Jew-hating African-American demogogue and cult-leader (along with psycho-psychotherapist Fred Newman) Lenora Fulani. Blank is a career criminal with several convictions on his record but who has not yet been prosecuted for his more serious and violent crimes against me. I do not know if he is under investigation for his financial and political ties to a group leftishly calling itself the Freedom Socialist Party, which according to an unrebutted December 26, 2005 article in the New York Post, was (is?) under international investigation for ties to terrorism in Iraq. The FSP spokesperson, a Blank associate named Stephen Durham, is on record in the Post article as supporting the hostage beheadings perpetrated by the late Musab al Zarqawi. In fact, Geoffrey Blank is the closet thing to New Yorker al Qaeda supporter I have met.

Thanks to a series of UP FRONT News exposes and several criminal convictions Blank has been deposed as the Saddam Hussein of Union Square. Another Blank wacko making occasional appearances near the revived speakouts is the "Staten Island Stalker" Gary ("Enough") Phaneuf, a violent "missing link"-type who dresses up like one of Mao's murderous Red Guard vigilantes and tries to sell the Chinese Communist local house organ, sometimes to eyerolling Staten Island ferry commuters.

Several months ago, largely as a result of the initiatives of a former Blank associate Eric Rassi and myself, the speakouts were restarted. We were helped by the fact that, with the assistance of speakout veteran Griggs, I had obtained a copy of the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court "Saia decision." In summary the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of an upstate New York evangelizer (Saia) to preach the Word through a bullhorn on the streets without a permit. The Court determined that a bullhorn, as distinct from a full-fledged sound system, is essential to the practice of First Amendment-protected free speech and that no permit is required for bullhorn use. (Geoffrey Blank in fact used a different sort of "bull.") I made certain, via intermediaries, that NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly acquainted himself (and Michael Bloomberg) with the Saia decision and to take the necessary action to keep the First Amendment-hostile brass at the 13th precinct under control.

Mr. Rassi, Roman Shusterman and I have been the most regular organizers and participants of the speakouts and the occasional post-speakout meetings. The speakouts, (bullhorn use open to anyone with time limits and a taboo on profanity and racial/ethnic slurs) have included small "d" democratic leftists such as myself, Eric Rassi as well as small "d" democratic conservatives like the Ayn Rand "objectivist" Frank Giallombardo, and the "humanist/pacifist" Shusterman. There have been poets and singers. Indeed, the speakout, scheduled for Thursday and Sunday afternoons and evenings, have drawn crowds of increasing size. The crowds do, however, tend to thin out when, as he does on occasion, Richie Degen begins to spout through the bullhorn. To hear him for example talk about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case, one might think that Degen was a witness to the 1981 shootings of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner and African-American radical journalist cab driver Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia in which officer Faulkner wound up dead. In the subsequent trial Mumia was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Both the conviction and the sentence are being appealed.

Indeed, Degen, not known for the thoroughness of his readings of history, is absolutely certain that convicted and executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.

My own view is that I do not know the facts of what happened that night in Philadelphia (I think that Abu-Jamal's brother, also a cabdriver and present at the time of the shooting, may have been involved. Reportedly a man by the name of Arnold Beverly has confessed to the shooting of officer Faulkner. I also think that the trial judge was and is a racist and that Abu-Jamal did not get a fair trial. As far as Sacco and Vanzetti are concerned, I know at least one very knowledgeable leftist who is convinced they were guilty. In any case, I am opposed to the death penalty.) Richie Degen is an "anarchist" balloon. He is full of hot air.

A couple of speakout regulars told me that a few weeks ago, when Richie Degen and a few other occasional speakout people, Ted Rourke and Kim Schimdt, happened to be in Union Square, they were approached as speakout participants by a "filmmaker" connected to the "Diesel" clothing store on the corner of Union Square West and 14th Street. According to reports I have from several speakout-connected sources (none of them Richie Degen), for being in some kind of film each was paid a total of $150. Speakout participant Sophia Boswell (who has dual Israeli/U.S. citizenship, and has what may be described as "right wing" views on the Arab/Israeli issues; she is also an effective speaker and so I have dubbed her the Sarah Palin of Union Square) told me that Degen had since assured her that he would show up in Union Square on Thursday, Sept. 4. He didn't. (I am not surprised. It took well over a year for me to collect some money I had lent Degen, the repayment only taking place after a loud and embarrasing - to him - confrontation between us in Tompkins Square Park as he was eating some free food.)

As far as I am concerned, regardless of film content, the filming is speakout-related and as such any monies paid belong to the group as a whole. The group would certainly include Ms. Boswell, Mr. Rassi, Mr. Shusterman, myself and perhaps some others.

I sent an e-mail bout this to Ted Rourke. In his (initial?) reply he acknowledged the payments and suggested that the filming was devoid of political content. In my reply, I wrote that content is irrelevant since the financial offer was made, as far as I am aware, to people on the basis of their involvement in the speakouts. I haven't heard back from Mr. Rourke.

Eric Rassi expressed his unhappiness about the payments to me, indicating that he opposes accepting money in this way from a corporate source.

I am also told that in Richie Degen's film segment he was very political.

I am also told that on his own Degen returned to "Diesel", demanded more paid filming and became irate when he was turned down. I am also told that the virulently anti-Israeli Degen, who may fancy himself an anarchist Don Juan of the Vito Fossella/John Edwards Hollywood stud variety, made the Zionist Ms. Boswell an inappropriate offer that she had no trouble refusing.

On September 9 Degen sent me an e-mail which can only be described as irrational and defamatory. He accuses me of being paid by Barack Obama, of being connected to the Mossad (the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, only the Mossad does a much better job) and to the Police Benevolent Association.

When it comes to integrity Richie Degen is approaching one of the icons of hypocrisy, Geoffrey Blank, in his fundamental lack of principle. Degen is a guy who publicly labels the NYPD a "criminal organization" and then presses charges against a fellow speakout activist Dennis Griggs. During a political discussion some months ago at the Odessa Restaurant, Degen literally got in the recurrently volatile Griggs' face. He ignored Griggs' urgings to cease and desist. (It was at that point that I moved to another table and so I missed the physical contact. Eric Rassi served as the volunteer referee.) Degen wound up with a cut on his nose.

Degen, with both what he perceives as his dignity and his nose injured, insisted on having Griggs arrested. Accompanied by Mr. Rassi and myself (I am no apologist for fisticuffs but, since there was absolutely no serious injury, I urged him not to press charges) Degen entered the 9th precinct to do business with what he regards as a "criminal organization."

Griggs was in fact arrested and released shortly thereafter, the situation creating a temporary crisis because of Mr. Griggs' disabled daughter, who was with him and who requires constant supervision.

As far as I am concerned, based on the information I have, a total of $450 should be turned over to the group for deposit and for a decision as to what to do with the money. I for one might support donating a portion to Mr. Rourke and Ms. Schmidt for their film labors. Giving money to Richie Degen is like investing in an anarchist hedge fund.
* * * * * * *

POLITICAL WARFARE IN STATEN ISLAND. WAGNER COLLEGE (TWICE) HARASSES A JOURNALIST (ME).

UP FRONT News September 6, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

POLITICAL WARFARE IN STATEN ISLAND. WAGNER COLLEGE (TWICE)
HARASSES A JOURNALIST (ME). THE SILENCE OF "ARTIST" APRIL (AKA ALEX) HART. IT'S POLITICAL. THE GEOFFREY BLANK (LAROUCHE) AND BETSY GOTBAUM/STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE ANGLES. ROBERT MORGENTHAU, MATTHEW TITONE, DIANE SAVINO, AND MICHAEL McMAHON CONTINUE TO COVER UP.

By Tom Weiss

A couple of years ago as a journalist I attended an "anti-War" event at Wagner College in Staten Island. Among the participants were members of Peace Action of Staten Island (PASI), a small but recurrently visible group that has both sincere peace advocates and some very hotheaded political extremists. Indeed, on November 12, 2005 at a so-called PASI Peace & Justice Festival in Tappen Park, not far from my home in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, I had a loud confrontation with invited guest speaker Geoffrey Blank, a known criminal and neo-fascist from Queens who promotes the extremist ideologies of people like Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Lenora Fulani and Saddam Hussein.

The clearly psychopathic Blank is guilty of a number of politically motivated crimes, some of them against me, mostly in connection with his attempted hijacking of Union Square, Manhattan speakouts conducted by a leaderless free speech group called the No Police State Coalition. While Blank was for a time the beneficiary of some puff media attention in The New York Times, The Villager, and WBAI, the full story of his pseudo-left demagoguery and criminality appears in several issues of UP FRONT News. Blank became quite notorious for bellowing about "free speech" through a bullhorn in Union Square and simultaneously threatening those, in particularly me, who dissented from his views, which, couched in "anti-Bush" language, bore a remarkable similarity to the rhetoric of Al Qaeda. Blank in fact is linked to a group calling itself the Freedom Socialist Party that, according to an unrebutted article by Niles Lathem in the New York Post on December 26, 2005, is under international investigation for ties to terrorism in Iraq. Indeed, the FSP spokesperson, a Geoffrey Blank associate named Stephen Durham, is on record in that article is condoning the hostage beheadings perpetrated by the late Musab al Zarqawi.

Geoffrey Blank had been invited to speak at the PASI event by PASI organizer, self-described "anarchist" Mike May. Indeed some months before, when I was a Democratic write-in peace candidate against the militaristic Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate, activist college teacher Giovanni Marinelli, no doubt unaware of May's ties to Geoffrey Blank, had introduced me to May at the Staten Island coffeehouse/nightclub then known as The Muddy Cup (now The Cup). Indeed Mr. Marinelli had suggested that I might be a speaker at the event. Mike May's response could fairly be described as cool. May failed to respond to a couple of polite e-mails from me. When I learned of the Blank invitation, I sent May a couple of more e-mails containing some facts about Blank, a racist, sexist, and violent individual whose full list of crimes has not yet been prosecuted. No response.

When I ran into May handing out flyers at the St. George Ferry terminal a few days before the November 12, 2005 event, I politely approached him about my e-mails. May reacted with a sudden and loud outburst of anger and, when he literally leaped in my direction, I pulled back and a policeman nearby came to separate us. I told the cop about Geoffrey Blank and Mike May and got on the ferry while May continued to hand out flyers, almost all of which wound up in ferry trash cans.

I invited No Police State Coalition activist Roman Shusterman, a man very knowledgeable about Geoffrey Blank, to the Staten Island event. When Blank arrived, I unleashed a barrage of expose-style heckling not unlike what Blank had to face from me in Union Square, but only long after he had suppressed my right to speak and criminally harassed me (and sometimes others) on multiple occasions. It soom became apparent, first to me and later to others - including many UP FRONT News readers - that Blank was an ideological stalking horse for the convicted felon, racist and megalomaniac LaRouche. Whenever I would ask Blank about the connection, he would respond with silence and his trademark satanic grin.

Geoffrey Blank's younger brother Jason, however, pretty much let the crypto-fascist cat out of the bag in a conversation some years ago with No Police State activist and bicyclist and photographer Tomas Melchor. In response to Mr. Melchor's inquiry of Jason (who, despite being in his 30's and only a few years younger than Geoffrey, openly functions as his older sibling's indentured servant) as to the UP FRONT News-reported LaRouche/Blank ties, the baby brother replied, "I'd rather not answer that question."

Lyndon LaRouche, now a once again politically hyperactive septuagenarian, has been described by investigative reporter Dennis King as "the most dangerous man in America." LaRouche, who masquerades as an FDR-worshiping Democrat, is an admirer of Hitler and similar personalities but is well disguised - using Mr. King's characterization - as a "nazi without a swastika." LaRouche, who spent seven years in a couple of federal penitentiaries after his conviction for mail and credit card fraud, is notorious for his dramatic ideological shifts from the ultra-left to the ultra-right - and, more recently (as the Bush presidency has imploded), back to the ultra-left. Mr. King's very unauthorized biography of LaRouche, properly titled "The New American Fascism", writes about LaRouche's efforts to ignite a race war in America by collaborating with the KKK and simultaneously with rabidly anti-white elements among the Black Muslims. These days LaRouche has become something of a poster-boy for genocide-perpetrating Communist China and Jihadist Iran.

LaRouche, who is despised by most people aware of him, runs a cult and actively spreads his venom through surrogates, perhaps the most prominent of whom is the African-American racist Lenora Fulani, herself a protege of the racist Jewish cult leader "psychotherapist" "Dr." Fred Newman, creator of the politics-and-sex-with-your-therapist hoax called "social therapy." Lenora Fulani, quite successfully using her rhetorical gifts, has for years presented herself as a populist and black nationalist. At the same time, for years, capitalizing on the widespread dissatisfaction among Americans with both the Democratic and Republican Parties, she has been singing the siren song of "independent" and "third party" politics. As the LaRouche/Newman-created pseudo-left fraud known as the New Alliance Party (NAP) folded (after being exposed first in UP FRONT News and later in the Boston Phoenix, the Village Voice and elsewhere), NAP mouthpiece Fulani tried to politically seduce third party presidential candidate Ross Perot in the 1990's. She made a similar attempt with right winger Pat Buchanan. As they recognized the neo-fascist in their midst and separated from her, she created the Independence Party of New York which, partly due to her propagandistic gifts, became the third largest political party in New York State.

The IPNY's main operative in Staten Island is long time Fulaniite Sara Lyons. (Since I am running for congress and the IPNY has endorsed Carmine Morano for Congress, Lyons, Fulani and LaRouche will be campaign issues.)

Selling herself to the highest bidder, Ms. Fulani endorsed Republican Michael Bloomberg and gave him the Independence Party ballot line in 2001, enabling Bloomberg to squeeze by Democrat Mark Green in a very close election. Fulani did the same thing in 2005, helping Bloomberg defeat Democrat Fernando Ferrer in a less close contest. In return the Bloomberg-controlled Industrial Development Agency awarded Fulani's front organization, The All Stars Project, with major tax breaks. Ms. Fulani does not talk about her political godfather LaRouche in public.

Fulani also operationalized LaRouche's Hitler-conceptualized split-the-left strategy by infiltrating the Green Party, in fact generating and controlling the Ralph Nader presidential candidacies, which have given us eight years of Cheney/Bush. Green Party crypto-fascist operatives using "fifth column" disguise tactics include Gerald Kann (still with Nader), Paul ("Zool") Zulkowitz, a violent thug named George Tatevosyan, Cathy Sadell, Cathy Stewart, et. al. This year LaRouche and subjects have widened their split-the-left efforts as, even while people like the Kann (a Blank associate) have stuck with Nader, the Green Party, seeking to sink Barack Obama while breathing leftist anger at McCain, has endorsed former U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney for president. And like Nader, although Ms. McKinney did tell me that she has discussed her presidential candidacy with Fulani, she has remained tight-lipped about the LaRouche connection.

And now, back to the peace event at Wagner College. I attended the event as an observer/journalist for awhile, taking care not to interact with the PASI element there. As I was later sitting outside for a break, I was approached by two Wagner security officers and ordered to leave the campus under penalty of arrest. When I asked why, they made a general reference some kind of complaint from someone at the peace event.

I subsequently made a complaint to the president of Wagner and, via an administrator there, was advised that the matter would be investigated. I recall no further communication with Wagner.

In April, 2008 I attended a performance event at the Everything Goes Bookstore Cafe (ETG) in Staten Island. Among the performers was Alex Hart. Ms. Hart also announced that she was a painter and mentioned her upcoming exhibit at Wagner. After the performance, I introduced myself to Ms. Hart as a journalist. She readily invited me to the May 9 opening at the Horrmann Library and wrote down the information for me and, at my request, gave me her e-mail address.

I arrived at Horrmann perhaps a 1/2 hour before the opening. After I identified myself as a journalist there for Ms. Hart's exhibit opening, the library person asked me for a picture ID, which I gave her. After a few moments and after consulting a document on her desk, she ordered me to leave, stating only that my name was on a "list." When I asked her the source of the list, she did not reply, headed for a phone and called security. A few minutes later a short and surly female security guard showed up, angrily ordered me to leave and, as had the librarian, ignored my assurances that I was there on invitation from Ms. Hart. As two other security people arrived on some kind of politically correct mini-vehicle I left. I later called a police officer with the NYPD's Intelligence Division to advise him that I had (again) been criminally harassed at Wagner College.

I subsequently got on touch by telephone with Wagner College President Frank Guarasci and was referred to his Chief of Staff David Martin. It took him awhile to follow up on his promise to reply to the e-mail he requested of me. Some time later in a somewhat apologetic e-mail to me, he made reference to having read an article in 2005 in the Staten Island Advance about my very public dispute with my acquaintance (via a family member of mine) of many years, with the seriously paranoid and CIA-linked NYC Public Advocate Betsy Got-baum. Ms. Gotbaum, a wealthy and ambitous power-seeker (she wants to be mayor), has a closetful of skeletons, some involving the CIA and some involving adultery. (Ms. Gotbaum is reportedly a card-carrying member of the Elliot Spitzer/Vito Fossella/John Edwards/Bill Clinton anti-monogamy society.) Her anxiety about me as a reporter, who sometimes covers events she has been at, led her to once suggest on television that she was being victimized by a "stalker." Since she had once privately made such a defamatory reference to me in a communication to her Public Advocate opponent Norman Siegel, with whom I am quite well politically acquainted, I knew her "stalker" comment referred to me. I went to the papers. In fact on August 26, 2005 NYC Newsday's Dan Janison broke the story and, in so doing, also broke the story of my U.S. Senate candidacy against Hillary Clinton. On August 27, the Daily News (Celeste Katz) and The New York Time (Jonathan Hicks) also published articles accurately reporting my side of the story.

Bringing up the rear was Tom Wrobleski of the Staten Island Advance, who had been willfully suppressing the news of my U.S. Senate candidacy for months. Seeing Newsday's story, Wrobleski hurriedly called me asking for an "exclusive." On August 27, with a front page lead, Wrobleski's story appeared. It was so riddled with willful errors and so pro-Gotbaum-slanted that one attorney said it constituted defamation. His article also contained totally false and defamatory comments about me made by State Senator Diane Savino (D.-S.I.) and by the corrupt and competent political hack Keith Parascandola, then Chief of Staff to Assemblyman John Lavelle and, following Lavelle's death, Assemblyman Matthew Titone. Titone has since earned the UP FRONT News award for the being the worst state legislator in what has been rated as "the worst state legislature in the country." (Gotbaum, in her pathologically secretive way, later telephoned an apology for her "stalker" defamation to my UP FRONT News associate and friend Willard Whittingham.)

It was Wrobleski's article and Savino's and Parascandola's comments that Wagner's David White cited as a reason for the security call. White also made reference to the earlier incident involving the peace event. Mr. White, apparently not wishing to further interfere with my First Amendment rights, suggested that, if and when I wish to return to Wagner, I should contact security.

In order to expedite the clearing up of the harassment against me at Wagner on May 9, I sent Ms. Hart an e-mail advising her of the incident and, since I did not have a written invitation at the time, asking that she send me an e-mail confirming that invitation. Ms. Hart did not reply. I do not know why.

The guy who had introduced Ms. Hart at her performance at Everything Goes was the emcee Mister Mark Davis (he insists upon being addresses as "Mister"), who told me that he and Ms. Hart are good friends. I told him about the incident and he acknowledged that he had heard about it from Ms. Hart, who was "sorry" that it had happened. When I told him that I had not received a reply to my polite e-mail to her, he became visibly somewhat nervous but said he would bring it up with her again. Receiving nothing, I called Mr. Davis who was not responsive during our brief weekday 10:00 AM conversation. In response to my subsequent e-mail to him, he sent me an angry, nervous reply complaining that I had awakened him and asserting that he would not help any more (as if he had already been of help).

I am a write-in candidate for the U.S. Congress in the 13th congressional district, which includes all of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. And so, as a candidate, journalist and law-abiding citizen, I expect to visit Wagner and I expect Wagner to end its suspension of my civil rights. For more on my candidacy please visit http://www.tomweissforuscongress.blogspot.com/

And so when I saw Mister Mark Davis at the ETG open mic August 30, I carefully brought up Ms. Hart's non-response. Indeed on August 30 some of Ms. Hart's paintings, under the name April Hart (two names, two personalities?), were on exhibit at ETG. I reminded him that the matter of the Wagner harassment against me is known to law enforcement and that there is therefore the possibility that Ms. Hart could be contacted as part of a criminal investigation. An e-mail from her to me confirming the invitation could considerably simplify matters, certainly for me. Davis rather blithely said that Ms. Hart is "fine" with a contact from law enforcement. I replied that I think that, especially since I went to the lengths of showing up at her exhibit, perhaps to do a review, Ms. Hart would do well to show some consideration toward me and send me an e-mail. At that point Davis got very nervous and said only, "I can't discuss this any more." And I told him I'd wait a few days for an e-mail from Ms. Hart and, in the absence of an e-mail from her, she can expect some honest coverage in UP FRONT News, and perhaps (if the Staten Island Advance and the college paper The Wagnerian, et. al. pick up the story) elsewhere.

Artistic talent and good character are not synonymous. Alex ("April") Hart is covering up something. UP FRONT News has been exposing coverups for decades.

And when it comes to other political crimes against me, at least one very violent one involving Geoffrey Blank and not yet prosecuted, New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and the entire political establishment in Staten Island, including City Councilman Michael McMahon, Diane Savino and Matthew Titone are covering up also.
* * * * * * *

WAGNER COLLEGE SUSPENDS THE BILL OF RIGHTS FOR A JOURNALIST (ME) ON CAMPUS.

UP FRONT News June 11, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

WAGNER COLLEGE SUSPENDS THE BILL OF RIGHTS FOR A JOURNALIST (ME) ON CAMPUS. THE DEFAMATORY LEGACY OF NYC PUBLIC ADVOCATE BETSY ("CIA") GOTBAUM AND STATE SENATOR DIANE SAVINO, PROTECTED BY THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE. "ARTIST" ALEX HART WIMPS OUT AND OPEN MIC HOST "MISTER MARK DAVIS" LOSES HIS COOL.

By Tom Weiss

Although Wagner College, affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is
named after the son of Rochester, N.Y.-based John G.Wagner, in consideration of how it abuses visiting journalists, e.g. me, the school might more appropriately named after the composer Richard Wagner, who had a strong totalitarian bent. (Wagner, the composer of a bunch of mega-heroic Teutonic operas, was Adolf Hitler's favorite composer.)

A couple of months ago at a well-attended open mic event at the Everything Goes Book-store Cafe (aka ETG) in Staten Island, one of the performers, Alex Hart (a woman, her name notwithstanding) made it known that she is also a painter and that she was having an opening of her exhibit at the Horrmann Library at Wagner College on May 9. I introduced myself as a reporter (UP FRONT News is well known at ETG and environs) and she invited me to attended the opening and, at my request wrote down the location specifics and travel direction along with her e-mail address.

I got to the library at around 5:15 PM or so, before the scheduled 6:00 PM opening. I told the librarian at the front desk that I was a reporter there to see and possibly review the Alex Hart exhibit, which was visible at some distance from the front desk. At the librarian's request I showed her some identification. She then looked at some kind of document, asked me to state my name (maybe she had some reading problem, unusual in a librarian) and then told me I had to leave. She refused to provide an explanation, stating only that my name was on a list. She refused my request as to who may have issued such an order and then called security. A few moments later a short uniformed female security person arrived and ordered me to leave. Her attitude was not unlike what Hillary Clinton's might be were I to enter her mansion in lily-white Chappaqua, N.Y. unexpectedly. When I told her that I had been invited by the "artist" (I am now using that word loosely) Alex Hart to attend her opening, the security person became somewhat abusive and called for backup, which arrived shortly thereafter in the form of two males on some sort of politically correct vehicle. I told them I didn't need to be accompanied to the campus exit.

Indeed, I had once been similarly harassed at Wagner a few years ago when, with an invi- tation, I attended an anti-War event there. While there I noted the presence of some "peace" activists known for their aggressiveness but said and did nothing, since I was there as a journalist. As I was sitting outside, a couple of security people came over and ordered me to leave.

The next day I called Wagner Administration to complain. I recall no e-mail exchanges but I did communicate at the time with an administrator, left my contact information and never heard from Wagner again.

Some days after the harassment at the Alex Hart show, I called the office of Wagner College President Dr, Richard Guarasci. He referred me to his Chief of Staff David Martin.

I spoke to Mr. Martin at some length by phone expressed no awareness of the incident or any reason for banning me from the campus. He said he would investigate and asked me to send him and e-mail. I agreed to do so with the explicit understanding that, upon his receipt of my e-mail, he would send me an immediate e-mailed acknowledgement. I sent my e-mail on May 14 and he reneged on his promise. I sent a second e-mail on May 16 and received his reply, which stated that he was busy with commencement exercizes and that he would be in contact "very soon."

On May 28 I got an e-mail from him stating that I had been "asked to leave" (his first mistake, no one "asked" me) because of a "previous incident on campus" but providing no further specifics.

And then Mr. Martin got Wagner and a bunch of people into big political (and possibly legal) trouble. He made reference to an August 27, 2005 article in the Staten Island Advance about the dispute between NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and me over her having defamed me by making a televised reference to me as a "stalker." Ms. Gotbaum, clearly one of the most paranoid people to ever have held elective office in New York, had once claimed to attorney and Public Advocate Norman Siegel that I was "stalking" her. In fact, via a family member of mine, I have been personally acquainted with Betsy Gotbaum since 1979. Ms. Gotbaum, who has at least one closetful of skeletons (e.g. CIA ties, adultery), some years ago tried to have me arrested at her office when I was there for a scheduled appointment with her Chief of Staff Scott Coccaro to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters. Fortunately the officer called, Sgt. Al Fiore, is a good deal more stable and competent than the clearly psychologically impaired Gotbaum. After interviewing me for several minutes, Sgt. Fiore realized that Gotbaum's assertion that I had made a "threat" against Linda Gibbs, at the time the Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services (Gibbs had covered up the staff abuse of homeless people and I had criticized her in UP FRONT News) was nonsense. He told me to go home and leave Gotbaum alone for awhile.

In fact I have never stalked anyone in my life. My response to the suggestion that I might stalk Betsy Gotbaum is always the same. I refer to a great country song by Dwight Yoakum titled "I Ain't That Lonely Yet." I have written that if Gotbaum were the only woman on earth and I were desperate, I would revert to celibacy. In fact, by suggesting that anyone other than the most carnally desperate would stalk the narcissistic Betsy Gotbaum is flattering herself. Indeed she is also flattering herself with her announced interest in becoming the mayor of NYC. And, considering her close ties to the surveillance community, she is about as qualified to be mayor of New York City as is J. Edgar Hoover.

The Staten Island Advance article referred to, written by Tom ("Wrongleski") Wrobleski, one of the most dishonest journalists I've ever encountered, is riddled with factual errors and also
contains defamatory comments about me by State Senator Diane Savino and Keith Para-scandola, then the Chief of Staff to Assemblyman Joh Lavelle's. After Lavelle died, Para-
Parascandola became Chief of Staff to Assemblyman Matthew Titone, the man who may be the worst legislator in what has been properly rated as "the worst state legislature in the country."

Tom ("Wrongleski") Wrobleski is the political editor for what has to be the most politically censored daily paper in New York. That however should be no surprise in a paper that is owned by Donald Newhouse, a reactionary and First Amendment-ignoring multibillionaire. The Staten Island A Advance is corporate media at its worst.

In fact Wrobleski suppressed the story of my Democratic write-in candidacy for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton for months and then, thanks to Betsy Gotbaum's destructive stupidity, got scooped by Dan Janison in NYC Newsday.

In fact the obviously journalistically limited David Martin didn't bother to read the Gotbaum
vs. Weiss articles in Newsday (August 26, 2005), the Daily News and The New York Times (both August 27), all of which were far more objective than Wrobleski's garbage.

In fact after I wrote an article on my U.S. Senate campaign blog accusing Wrobleski of censorship, he was essentially ordered to write an article about my campaign. That artiicle appeared on the front page of the Staten Island Advance on August 21, 2006. As I have written, the article would probably get a C+ from an easy grader in journalism school. Wrobleski spent about 85-90% of the article on the technicalities of running as a write-in and devoted scant attention to my very heavy issues with Clinton, such as her direct involvement, and that of her wandering husband, in the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet.

Since then the Advance has been made fully aware of the negligence and corruption of for example Titone and Savino. Savino's Chief of Staff, Robert Cataldo is a de facto wacko who once nearly assaulted me when I was there for an appointment in connection with a serious
emergency when I was homeless. Diane Savino, who is clearly a very, very poor judge of character, still has Cataldo on staff. She has also lied to me with regard to a promised meeting with her to discuss some very serious matters, including the mishandling by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of the prosecution of Wan Yun, who on April 7, 2005 violently assaulted me. Involved in the de facto criminal conspiracy is the Wan Yun acquaintance the terrorsm and Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.-linked extremist Geoffrey Blank, who lives in Rockaway Park, Queens but has ties to some hotheads in the Staten Island "peace" movement.

Back to Wagner. Mr. Martin, in his e-mail to me, directs me to contact Wagner's Director of public safety Tony Martinesi when I plan to visit again. My reply reminds him of the U.S. Constitution and, in very diplomatic language, tells him what he can do with that suggestion.

Because Wagner in fact violated my human rights, I am asking law enforcement to investigate. And since my lawyer, Jacob J. Goodman, passed away some months ago, I contacted civil rights attorney and (again) NYC Public Advocate candidate Norman Siegel (who is helping me find a new lawyer) and told him about Wagner College's apparent Declaration of Exemption from the requirements of the U.S. Constitution.

I have also asked, with two e-mails, Alex Hart to make things easier for me (and for her) by sending me an e-mail confirming the invitation to her show. She has refused to respond.

I have also discussed the matter with ETG open mic host "Mister Mark Davis" (that is how he insists upon being called), who describes himself as a friend of Ms. Hart. He told me that she is of course aware of the incident that took place before she arrived at her exhibit on May 9. He said she felt sorry about it but that she "preferred" not to put anything into writing. I politely suggested that he try again and offered him my business card. Stating that he would "lose" my card, he refused it and asked me to write him. Witnessing the conversation between Mister Mark Davis and me that took place in front of the ETG bookstore on May 31 was singer Frank Giallombardo. He and I later commented on the evasiveness of a guy who uses a business card to promote himself and refuses mine.

In any event, after not receiving a reply from Ms. Hart to my very first polite e-mail I called
"Mister." He again said that Ms. Hart "prefers" not to put anything into writing. He suggested that she might be concerned about some punitive action by Wagner. I told him that I was mainly trying to obviate the necessity of her being contacted by law enforcement. At that point "Mister" became somewhat hysterical and said, "My friend [Alex] is not a criminal." I replied that I had no recollection of having made any suggestion that she is. I again asked him to bring the matter up with Ms. Hart again. "Mister's" response was silence and so I hung up. The next day I got a somewhat hysterical e-mail from "Mister" complaining that I had awakened him (my call was after 10 AM on a weekday) and stating he did not want to assist me further, an absurd statement since he hadn't helped me yet.

Betsy Gotbaum needs to make very public the apology for her defamation of me that she had an aide phone to my UP FRONT News associate Willard Whittingham.

Tom Wrobleski should be removed as the political editor of the Staten Island Advance, appropriately characterized by my pastor civil rights leader Rev. Demetrius Carolina of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton, Staten Island as a "controlled" newspaper (another S.I. African-American activist labels the paper "racist").

"Artist" Alex Hart needs to be less fearful and to be less of an ingrate. (In fact, at the very least she owed me an e-mailed "thank you" for trying to attend her show.)

"Mister" Mark Davis needs to be more helpful to others and, at least with respect to me, to chill. And as far as his open mics are concerned, it will be interesting to see if he respects the First Amendment there.

Machine politician Diane Savino needs to get rid of Robert Cataldo and to start telling the truth.

And machine politician Matthew Titone should hope that no independent-minded activist, Republican or Democrat challenges him for the Assembly seat he is disgracing.

And (Richard?) Wagner College needs to clean up its act.
* * * * * * *

A VOTE FOR RALPH NADER IS A VOTE FOR JOHN McCAIN

UP FRONT News September 26, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

No matter what Ralph Nader says on any issue at this point, the fact remains that he remains a stalking horse for the split-the-left politics of Lyndon LaRouche and Lenora Fulani. Like LaRouche's fascist predecessors Hitler and Mussolini, the Virginia-based felon, racist and megalomaniac does not come on "conservative" but rather selectively ultra-left. The strategy, just like Hitler's depicting himself as a capitalism-denouncing "socialist", is to factionalize progressives, whether moderate, liberal or radical. Ultimately the electoral benefi-ciaries are the right-wingers, who won office in Weimar Germany and in 2000 and 2004 here. No amount of rationalizing can negate the fact that Nader's LaRouched/Fulani-controlled candidacy in 2000 helped elect Cheney/Bush and helped to re-elect them. Predictably things got worse socially and economically in Weimar Germany and have gotten worse in Cheney/Bush America, creating the conditions fascists need to advance to power.

Locally speaking, the clearest indication that the Fulaniites are still running things for Nader is the fact that a key Nader operative here is the crypto-fascist and violent Jerry Kann, a dedicated Fulaniite from the Long Island City/Astoria area of Queens who twice ran as the Green Party candidate for the City Council. As I recall the first time he garnered about 20% of the vote and the second time, after he was exposed in UP FRONT News as a violent LaRouche/Fulani loyal crypto-fascist he drew about 8%. No doubt Nader is also being supported by the left-spewing thug George Tatevosyan, a close associate of Mr. Kann. They'd be better off supporting their associate Geoffrey Blank.

This year LaRouche seems to be spreading his net even wider as the thoroughly LaRouche/
Fulani-infiltrated Green Party is running Cynthia McKinney. As far as I am aware the Green Party remains an essentially very non-proletarian almost lily-white group running an African-American for president. Ms. McKinney, with whom I've spoken on several occasions, is to be credited with raising important questions about the official story on 9/11 and for her support for self-determination for Tibet, perhaps among other issues. She has remained silent as to the nature of her political ties to Fulani & Co.

At a recent Union Square speakout Robert Hernandez spent a few minutes at the bullhorn waxing proletarian and singing the praises of Ms. McKinney. He was so enthralled with his wisdom that he didn't even bother to listen to my rebuttal dealing with the Fulani/LaRouche link. He was too busy screaming at a speakout observer.

A vote for Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney is a vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin!
* * * * * * *

THE PROFITEERS OF THE UNION SQUARE SPEAKOUTS

UP FRONT News September 25, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

As a great many Union Square speakout participants and observers are aware, three speakout participants, Richie Degen, Ted Rourke, and Kim Schmidt, using their speakout involvement, accepted payments of $150 each to participate in a film reportedly connected to the Diesel store on 14th St. and Union Square West. Ted Rourke, in acknowledging the payment, stated that the film content was not political. Speakout participant Sophia Boswell has advised me that Richie Degen, aside from his other indiscretions of a potentially more physical nature, told her that the film content was political. I have also been advised that Richie Degen, for whom other people's money is little more than a food handout to be taken and devoured, subsequently returned to Diesel, demanded more paid film time and became irate when refused.

As far as I am concerned, the money belongs to the speakout group as a whole and its use should be determined by the group, which most certainly includes a number of people, e.g. Eric Rassi, Roman Shusteran, and myself, beyond those who took the corporate money and ran.

Ted Rourke is in coverup mode having been unresponsive to my most recent e-mails. The only thing he had to say at a recent speakout when I asked him about it is, "I spent the money." So what? He has a job and can pay it back - even in installments. Kim Schmidt literally fled from Union Square at a speakout as soon as I brought the matter up. Richie Degen has responded as perhaps Lindsey Lohan or even the newly political Paris Hilton might, by suggesting that I perform on him what, if it involved him, would by definition be an unnatural act. I have refused. It is my understanding that the xenophobic Israel-hater Degen is so carnally deprived that be has tried to rather aggressively talk a rather militant Zionist of the opposite sex into bed. She has also wisely refused. Perhaps, in that case, Richie might consider using his ill-gotten gains as Elliot Spitzer did - only on a somewhat less extravagant level. There are presumably "anarchist" streetwalkers around.
*******

LES JAMIESON, LYNDON LAROUCHE, OSAMA BIN LADEN AND THE 9/11 "INSIDE JOB."

UP FRONT News September 18, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

Although I try to avoid making snap judgements on political matters, I am pretty much convinced that just about anything of a political nature, certainly including 9/11, emanating from either Les Jamieson or Frank Morales, regardlessly of how leftishly expressed, is at best poop and at worst a part of the "inside job" that they accuse various Americans of being involved in.

I won't go through the entire history of Jamieson's and Morales' repeated suppressions of for example my free speech rights at their dictatorially controlled "9/11 Truth" meetings at St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery Church in Manhattan. Much of the information as to how Jamieson and Morales have served as at least ideological agents for the mega-conspiracy theorist himself, the fascist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., is in my newspaper UP FRONT News at http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/.

Indeed Jamieson's first (whispered) threat against me came a few years ago when I suggested to him that guest speaker Webster Tarpley's experience as a major figure in the LaRouche cult should be made known to the "9/11 Truth" group as a whole. "You better keep your mouth shut about that", Jamieson hissed to me out of everyone's earshot. And then a few weeks later when at the post-Tarpley speech Q&A at St. Mark's, I included a LaRouche reference in my question to Tarpley, Jamieson desperately ran over and tried to physically push me away from the questioners' microphone.

Jamieson's and Morales' decision to invite the psychopath and neo-fascist LaRouche ideologue Geoffrey Blank as a guest speaker on December 4, 2005 almost led to political violence against me as Blank came with some reportedly club-bearing brownshirts of his such as the St. Mark's-regular wacko Karl Rosenstein, a seriously disturbed Blankie who has tried to assault me on three separate occasions. Other Blank brownshirts who threatened me that evening included the "Staten Island Stalker" Gary ("Enough") Phaneuf. Indeed these are some of the reasons why St. Mark's deserves its UP FRONT News-bestowed name of "Our Lady of LaRouche", at least as long as "Father Frank" Morales tries to LaRouche-ize Jesus.

As far as I am concerned, the cultist Jamieson - who as far as I am aware won't respond to questions about the sudden death of young Dan Wallace, a "9/11 Truth" participant who was also beleagured by LaRouchies and who had witnessed some of the Morales/Jamieson harassments against me and who did a video interview with me outside St. Mark's only to be found dead in his bed in Queens a few weeks later - is a part of the "inside job." With regard to the death of Dan Wallace, LaRouche victim Jeremiah Duggan comes to mind.

If Les Jamieson, citing the claimed expertise of Kevin Barrett, suggests that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, that in itself adds to the evidence that bin Laden was involved.

I would be very interested in knowing about any communications between for example Lyndon LaRouche (who has long enjoyed ties to terrorists, genocide practitioners, drug traffickers, Jew haters and Holocaust deniers and murderers) and Osama bin Laden. Since Jamieson is so interested in finding out the truth and since Jamieson is well acquainted with high-level laRouche-ites such as Tarpley, maybe he can get the answers as to whether Lyndon LaRouche was - and is - part of the inside job.

I won't hold my breath.
*******

MICHAEL McMAHON VS. SONNY CARSON - AND ME.

UP FRONT News August 14, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

MICHAEL McMAHON VS. SONNY CARSON - AND ME. A POLITICAL CHAMELEON SHUFFLES THE RACE CARDS IN THE NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL. IT'S A CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN ISSUE.

By Tom Weiss

While self-determination is a concept generally applied to international relations, it is just as relevant in connection with relations between local communities with each other and with our governments. Self-determination was the issue before the New York City Council in late May, 2007.

On May 30, 2007 as I was standing on Broadway by City Hall waiting to attend what proved to be an explosive City Council meeting on the Sonny Abubadika Carson street name change controversy, I ran into Councilman Tony Avella (D.-Queens) on his way to the meeting.

What follows is something of a digression but it is relevant to the Sonny Carson story. I am quite well politically acquainted with Mr. Avella, who may be the most independent-minded member of the Council, a body that is autocratically run Marie Antoinette-style ("Let them eat granola") by Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D.-Manh.) It was Mr. Avella who, after Quinn refused my urgings that she sponsor a City Council resolution citing the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet and calling for the removal of the 2008 Olympic Games from Beijing, agreed to meet with me, and later also with a group of Tibetan-Americans. After those meetings he introduced NYC Council Resolution #1299 (which cited Tibet and demanded the removal of the Games from China). The bill died in large part because it was suffocated by the silence of, among others, Christine Quinn. Quinn you see is essentially a major cog in the machine of Hillary Clinton, one of many politicians who put profit (e.g. in China and in New York) ahead of human rights.

Hillary and Bill Clinton are personally among those directly involved in the cover-up of the Genocide in Tibet. Much of the maistream media (which certainly includes the multi-billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance, the establishment paper in my home borough) is also involved in that coverup. Shades of the political and media (e.g. New York Times) coverup in the 1930's as Hitler's Holocaust against the Jews picked up much steam - even before the gas!

End of digression. I asked Mr. Avella if I could have a few minutes of his time and, unlike a host of other politicians with lots to hide, he said, "Sure." After Mr. Avella assured me that he was still a candidate for mayor (a political fact obscured by the machine-"controlled" Staten Island Advance and by much of the mainstream and "alternative" media but reported in some depth in UP FRONT News) I asked him about the upcoming Council vote on the Sonny Carson street name change issue.

The Council had before it a bill to change the name of a few blocks of Gates Avenue in Brooklyn to Sonny Abubadika Avenue. Sonny Carson, who died on December 20, 2002, grew from a young life in gangs and in prison into a very well-known and a rather uncompromising black nationalist who had been active for years in fighting police brutality, retail store discrimination, and the drug trade. He had played a major role in the establishment of Medgar Evers College.

As it turned out, some words Sonny Carson said years ago in what may be described as righteous anger became a political battle ground in the City Council. And as far as I am concerned, my City Councilman , Michael McMahon (D.-S.I.), voted wrong on this issue - as he does on many issues, not to speak of his unwillingness to do his job as representing all his constituents.

Carson was presumably not a popular man in the Jewish community, in part because of tensions between African-American tenants and Jewish landlords. (Indeed, for many years, I had one of the greediest, most violent, worst landlords ever, the very Orthodox Thomas Berger of Forest Hills, a politically connected - Ed Koch - real estate speculator, who cashed in on some Tribeca lofts, including the one I lived in from 1977 until 1993. This is a guy who, aside from using violence against me, kept me without heat and water for 5 1/2 years as he tried to force me out of my home on the top floor of 190-A Duane Street in Tribeca. One of his lawyers, perhaps anticipating the Michael Douglas-depicted "greed is good" character in "The Firm", at a Loft Board hearing on my case, actually said out loud, "What's wrong with greed?" Berger finally succeeded in displacing me with the major help of a corrupt "liberal" Democratic judge named Marilyn Shafer, who had me evicted for allowing someone to play a flute at a poetry reading at my home. Thomas Berger, very much a public figure in the Orthodox Jewish community, has gone to his synagogue on 108th Street in Forest Hills "religiously" for years while treating The Ten Commandments like trash, at least during business hours.) Carson was reportedly once asked if he was anti-Semitic. Perhaps tacitly acknowledging Semitic roots, Carson said he wasn't anti-Semitic and characterized himself as "anti-white."

On principle I am opposed to generalizations of this sort. At the same time, it might be quite understandable for a Jewish person (e.g. myself, part of whose family died in the Holocaust) to express dislike for Germans and Austrians. (Hitler was very, very popular in the Vienna from which my parents escaped in the nick of time, no thanks to French collaborators with the Nazis.) I've heard Tibetans express strong "anti-Chinese" sentiments. And, while I have nothing against Chinese people, I can very well empathize with the feelings and views often expressed by Tibetans. I am quite certain that many supporters of the Irish martyr Bobby Sands had "anti-English" feelings, perhaps similar to the anti-English views of Americans like George Washington, Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, and Tom Paine, et. al. When Quinn decided that she was not merely the Speaker but also the Queen of the New York City Council and pulled Carson's name out of the street name change list, several Councilmembers rebelled. The most vocal was Charles Barron, a black nationist and former Black Panther, who has done very important work in getting the drug traffickers out of East New York and in fighting police excess. He was a friend of Sonny Carson. (I've been acquainted with Mr. Barron for many years, having been introduced by Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Flushing, Queens, of which I am a member. Rev. Mitchell is in his 70's and retired. He is something of a legend in civil rights, since he worked closely with Rev.Martin Luther King for decades.)

The Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, including the Community Board, rather overwhelm-ingly had expressed its support for the Carson street name change. That is very understandable in a largely African-American community that has a street such as Gates Avenue named for a slaveowner.

When the name change documents, along with a number of similar changes for other streets for other communities, came to the Council, which must approve all such changes, Speaker Quinn pulled out the Carson change, declaring that Carson was "divisive" and that there would be no streets named after Sonny Carson.

Back to Tony Avella. As he has heading towards the entrance gate to City Hall, I asked him if I could talk with him briefly. Unlike a bunch of politicians with something to hide - Christine Quinn and NYC Public Advocate Betsy ("CIA") Gotbaum being two cases in point - Councilman Avella said, "Sure."

We talked a little about Tibet, tenants rights and his candidacy for mayor. I then asked
him how he planned to vote on the Carson street name change bill. He said he had not decided. I asked him if I could give him my view and he said, "Sure." I told him that, while I was not about to vouch for Sonny Carson's diplomatic gifts, I felt that the main issue was self-determination and that the Bedford-Stuyvesant community had a right to honor its own heroes. I also suggested that he discuss the issue with Councilman Barron, hopefully before the vote. He then went inside. I later entered and sat in the balcony packed with Carson supporters.

Not too long after City Councilmembers wandered into the ornate City Council chambers, Mr. Avella went over to Mr. Barron and they chatted together for several minutes, as I observed from the balcony.

The debate was long and very intense. Sitting in positions of monarch-style authority were Gotbaum and Quinn and there were repeated admonitions to the balcony to be quiet.
Charles Barron most certainly did not keep quiet, stating openly his admiration for Sonny Carson and his education-related (helping to start Medgar Evers College) and anti-drug ac-complishments. Barron was eloquently supported by Councilman Al Vann, in whose district the affected street blocks are located and who introduced the bill to restore Carson's name to the list for Council approval. A number of African-American legislators kept silent and ended up voting against the Carson bill, which lost by an atypically close vote. (Under the autocratic Quinn the Council tends to vote monolithically, often with dissenting votes from Avella and/or Barron.) The only two non-African-American Councilmembers who voted in favor of Mr. Vann's bill were Tony Avella and Rosie Mendez. Avella has long made it clear to me that he is not afraid to stand up to Quinn (whom he regards as a "prima donna") on any issue, most certainly including opposition to the Beijing Olympics and opposition to over-development and gentrification. Rosie Mendez (D.-Manh.) is to be congratulated for signs of independence from Christine Quinn.

Several non-African-American Councimembers also spoke against the bill. Councilman Oliver Koppell made known his opposition in a brief speech. In the days preceding the vote Mayor Bloomberg expressed the view, reported in the Daily News on May 29, 2007, that the proposal to name a street after Sonny Carson was "probably the worst idea the City Council, anybody in the City Council, has had in recent memory." The Mayor also said, "I think there's probably nobody whose name I could come up with who less should have a street named after him in this city than Sonny Carson." Hmm! I personally have never been partial to naming streets, etc., after slaveowners, who included a number of our presidents. And so I have serious reservations about the mayor's value system. My City Councilman, Mike McMahon, is much better known for putting his name on almost every garbage can in his North Shore Staten Island district (parts of which are nonetheless litter-ridden) than he is for his open-mindedness, his oratory, and any shred of integrity he may possess. He is also known to take personally any meaningful criticism of his immediate political boss, Christine Quinn, the Marie Antoinette New York City. Indeed, in an angry December, 2006 e-mail to me in which McMahon refused my request for his assistance on some very serious constituent matters, he cited his resentment over my earlier UP FRONT News criticism of Quinn.) I do not recall McMahon's exact words on the Carson bill although they hardly showed any respect whatsoever for Sonny Carson's accomplishments. The Irish-American McMahon, a Democratic Party machine politician from Staten Island, declares that he has the right to decide whom a black neighborhood in Brooklyn has the right to honor. I hope he doesn't start to pontificate about the self-determination rights of Georgians and other oppressed peoples. I wonder how McMahon might respond to very theoretical African-American and Anglo-Saxon opposition to naming a street in an Irish neighborhood after Bobby Sands. I've met the macho McMahon on a number of occasions. Like his Republicrat role models, Bloomberg, Quinn and Hillary Clinton, Mike McMahon is a political chameleon who puts on his more civil and civil rights persona when in front of African-American audiences or dealing with people like my pastor, the very influential Rev. Demetrius Carolina of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton. Indeed at a recent meeting at the church, Rev. Carolina - without visible enthusiasm - announced that "the next congressman" (when I asked to whom he was referring, he said "McMahon") would be visiting the church. Terrific! Rev. Carolina, whom I regard as an eloquent civil rights leader, knows there is no way that I will vote for Mike McMahon and that I hope no member of his church votes for a guy who, aside from his refusal to assist this churchmember, seems to think he is a better judge of Sonny Carson's character than Charles Barron and thousands of other African-Americans. To me Mike McMahon represents the worst kind of political and indeed ethnic arrogance. All this should be an important campaign issue for Steve Harrison, a progressive anti-Iraq War Democrat challenging McMahon for the Democratic nomination for Congress in the 13th C.D., which covers all of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. This district has become world famous as our Republican Congressman Vito Fossella, following the footsteps of such macho role models and Bill Clinton and Elliot Spitzer (but probably not however anticipating the fall of John Edwards), got arrested last May for DUI as he was automobile-careening his way to his lover's house in Virginia, as his (blissfully?) unaware wife and kids were at home in Staten Island. Within a few political moments of Fossella's fall from whatever "grace" he may have had, Mike McMahon, who had been after the Borough Presidency of Staten Island, announced his candidacy for congress. And, within a few political moments after that, the Clinton/Quinn-run Democratic machine that runs the North Shore of Staten Island like a colony lined up for McMahon as did some labor unions and political clubs. The Staten Island Advance, quite clearly New York's most politically censored newspaper, has pretty much endorsed its poster boy McMahon by editorializing that the next congressman should be from the Staten Island part of the district. Harrison lives in Brooklyn. I've discussed all this very directly with Steve Harrison. If he is ready to fully take on Mike McMahon and challenge him on his negligences vis as vis me, his cavalier attitudes about human rights (e.g. the Tibetans) and his shuffling of the race cards in the Council on the Sonny Carson issue, I'll support Harrison. If, however, Mr. Harrison wants to emulate John Kerry, who wimped out repeatedly in his run against George W. Bush in 2004, he will lose like Kerry, only probably by a significantly greater margin In that case Mike McMahon will also be up against me as a Democratic write- in candidate for the U.S. Congress.
* * * * * * *

STATEN ISLAND POLITICAL CONFRONTATION IN RACE FOR CONGRESS. DOES STEVE HARRISON WANT TO WIN?

UP FRONT News August 5, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

STATEN ISLAND POLITICAL CONFRONTATION IN RACE FOR CONGRESS. DOES
STEVE HARRISON WANT TO WIN? IF SO, HE NEEDS TO EXPOSE MIKE McMAHON
FOR FAILURE TO DO HIS CONSTITUENT SERVICES JOB AND FOR ABANDONING
HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE CITY COUNCIL. IF McMAHON WINS THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY IN SEPTEMBER VOTE FOR ME AS A DEMOCRATIC WRITE-IN CANDIDATE
FOR CONGRESS ON NOVEMBER 9.

By Tom Weiss

In what even mainstream political pundits are acknowledging will be a nationally watched campaign for the 13th congressional district seat, covering all of Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, held for few more months by the "family values" adulterer and Republican Vito Fossella, perhaps the worst break for progressive Democratic candidate Steve Harrison was the May 1 DUI arrest of Fossella. Fossella, the only Republican in New York City's congressional delegation, who served essentially as Big Dick Cheney's man in New York, was considered something of a favorite to be re-elected even in an expectedly Democratic year.
All that changed when Fossella, known for his pronouncements on family values and other virtues, drunk at the wheel, was arrested in Virginia. When the police asked him where he was going, apparently Fossella was so bombed that he spilled all his beans by saying he was on his way to see his daughter. In fact his wife and children live in Staten Island. The daughter he was going to see was also biologically parented by Fossella's lover.

As far as I am concerned, a congressman who endangers lives by driving drunk, even if he were in his way to a detox facility, should resign expeditiously. Instead, after trying to macho his way into running for re-election, he was told to forget about it by the Republicans, who agreed to let him finish out his term.

At the time of Fossella's arrest, the leading Democratic challenger was lawyer Steve Harrison, who lives in the Brooklyn part of the district and who was defeated by Fossella in 2006. (I voted for the strongly anti-Iraq War Harrison.) Although Harrison was outspent by Fossella by a large margin, he ran a strong race. It would be a rationalization, however, to suggest that the results were close. Fossella, aside from his financial advantage, also benefited from his residence in Staten Island, whose voters make up the majority of the district.

Mr. Harrison, having the support of at least some in the small but active peace "movement" in Staten Island, as well as some liberal Democratic club backing, had reason to be confident in a year when the Republicans are facing massive voter rejection that this time around he would beat Fossella.

Within moments of the news of Fossella's arrest, City Councilman Michael McMahon - who, in a politically selective fashion, "represents" the North Shore of Staten Island (where I live, and there is no question that Michael McMahon does not represent me) - began to at least politically salivate about moving into the seat to be involuntarily vacated by Fossella. Up to that point McMahon, a man for whom power and principle are unrelated, had been planning to run for the Borough Presidency of Staten Island. His anticipated opponent was his Council colleague Republican James Oddo. (I can't seriously consider voting for a politician in a political party led by a gang of liars and thieves, but I might have considered voting for Oddo, the guy who understandably became nationally known for taking on some baseball profiteers and ending the local use of sometimes lethal aluminum bats in Little League ball.)

Within a few days of the opportunistic McMahon's announcement that he is running for the Fossella seat, much of the Democratic Party establishment in Staten Island and beyond
was supporting this essentially Reagan Democrat, also known in UP FRONT News as a Republicrat. McMahon was a strong supporter of Republicrat Hillary Clinton, not surprising as they were both pro-Iraq War until they realized that most Americans, including those living in the heartland and in Staten island, were against it.

McMahon is essentially part of a non-biological political same sex marriage, with his partner being the gay rights-prominent autocratic City Council Speaker Christine Quinn of Manhattan, one of many politicians who talk tenants rights but, behind closed doors, help the mega-developers and gentrifiers.

I have made it known to Steve Harrison that, no matter how the September 9 Democratic primary between the favored McMahon and him turns out, I will not vote for McMahon, even against a Republican. It's partly personal.

As a City Councilman McMahon's job is to represent all his constituents. In fact, at least with respect to me, he has failed to do the job he is overpaid to do. My late attorney, Jacob J. Goodman, who was assisting me with a number of very serious problems involving major violations of my human rights by a number of government agencies (e.g. New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and the NYC Health & Hospitals Corporation) urged me to seek help from my elected representatives. Some of the problems stem from a major politically motivated April, 2005 assault upon me perpetrated by a man at least acquainted with a violent repeat offender and neo-fascist political extremist named Geoffrey Blank, a man with ties to international terrorism. Blank is also a guy with some political connections of his own, e.g. to the Lyndon LaRouche ideologue Lenora Fulani, who, despite her leftist and black nationalist (and sometimes overtly anti-Semitic) rhetoric, in her former capacity as the dictator of the Independence Party of New York, helped Michael Bloomberg get elected and re-elected. Morgenthau's office willfully mishandled the prosecution of the perpetrator, a very violent man named Wan Yun, and then Bellevue Hospital Center messed up very badly after my three hours of surgery and in fact denied me followup care for several years.

When, in late 2006 I met McMahon at a Christine Quinn-run "community" meeting at Seaview Hospital in Staten Island, during a break I introduced myself (actually a re-introduction since he and I had met previously) and I told him that I needed an appointment to discuss some serioius constituent matters and that my lawyer had suggested I access my elected officials. Councilman McMahon shook my hand, smiled, said "Sure" and advised me to call his district office in S.I.
I did call and got nowhere with his staffer JoAnne Carbone. I then sent Councilman Mcmahon an an e-mail on December 12, 2006. Within one day I got an angry e-mail from McMahon. He wrote that he was "offended" that I had criticized Ms. Quinn in UP FRONT News. I had in fact criticized her for her refusal to respond to my polite and totally appropriate e-mail, dated January 30, 2006 to her via her Chief of Staff Chuck Meara, urging her to introduce a resolution citing the Genocide in Tibet and calling for the removal of the 2008 Olympic Games from China. Indeed Ms. Quinn, largely at my urging, had introduced the pro-Tibet resolution #802 in 2001, which was unanimously passed by the Council. That resolution, however, had little impact because it did not address the Olympic Games issue. In fact Quinn no doubt bowed to the economic imperatives of her boss, Hillary Clinton, who makes big bucks in the capitalist wonderland of "Communist" China, and who has suppressed any efforts to help the Tibetans. I have all the facts on the Bill and Hillary Clinton's personal involvement in the political and media coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet.

McMahon's letter to me contains the totally specious assertion that having the City Council deal with "international issues" would be a "waste of time." The Council has a long record of addressing international issues, with the aforementioned Resolution #802 being a case in point. As far as I am aware, McMahon voted in favor of a pro-Iraq War resolution. I am also aware that the Council passed a resolution denouncing Communist China for its support of the Sudanese government's genocide in Darfur.

As far as my request for his assistance, McMahon wrote that I should to go to a civil rights attorney. By that, aside from insulting me, he was disrespecting my very experienced lawyer who had indicated that, any legal possible legal action notwithstanding, it was important for me to obtain the assistance of my elected officials. (With the assistance of civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, with whom I am acquainted and who has advised me on occasion, I have retained attorney David Rankin to assist me on these matters.)

I am now part of what may be a small minority group of people who have lived in all five bo- roughs of New York City (as well as upstate, in and around Binghamton). I now live in the very diverse working class community of Stapleton in North Shore Staten Island.

I've come to like Staten Island a great deal. It is definitely New York City's most "rural" bo- rough, a quality that S.I. shares with upstate New York. The ferry is in my opinion the best commute in New York and it is free. I am active with the energetic performing arts community in Staten Island, a borough that is home to a great many musicians, poets, painters and other artists. I belong to the mostly African-American very civil rights-active First Central Baptist Church, a short distance from my home. I consider the pastor, the very well known Rev. Demetrius Carolina, a friend. Indeed Rev. Carolina, who is one of the relatively few African-Americans leaders to have spoken out in support of Tibet, is knowledgeable about my human rights and political situation and has been consistently supportive to me in my dealings with the de facto lily-white Democratic Party political machine, consisting of Michael McMahon, State Senator Diane Savino and State Assemblyman Matthew Titone, all of whom march to the beat set by Hillary Clinton and Christine Quinn.

Should he choose to do so, Rev. Carolina is certainly in a position to comment on the game-playing against me by Savino and Titone. In Savino's case some years ago when I went with an appointment to her office on an urgent matter when I was homeless, her Chief of Staff Robert Cataldo greeted me with what amounted to a psychotic, profanity-laced tirade, threatening me with arrest. I have long since filed a criminal complaint against him. Savino then made things worse by mishandling the problem I needed help with, and then later making a defamatory comment about me that appeared in the establishment-protecting multi-billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance in its August 27, 2005 article about the "stalker" dispute between the seriously paranoid NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and myself. That story was much more accurately covered by NYC Newsday on August 26, 2005 by Dan Janison, the Daily News by Celeste Katz, and The New York Times by Jonathan Hicks, both on August 27. Savino has also since lied to me with her unkept promise made to me (at the First Central Baptist Church, which she visits, according to a church leader, "only when she needs something") that we would meet directly on my issues.

Matthew Titone has been properly exposed in UP FRONT News as "the worst state legislator" in what has been properly rated as "the worst state legislature in the country." Rev. Carolina knows the full story of Titone's months-long delaying tactics in response to my requests for an appointment. It took the intervention of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Assemblymember Janele Hyer-Spencer (D.-S.I.), Sgt. Al Fiore of the NYPD's Intelligence Division (the man who saived me from the paranoid Gotbaum's attempt to have me arrested at a scheduled meeting some years ago at her office), and Rev. Carolina before Titone emerged temporarily from his political paralysis and agreed to see me at the church. Indeed, he ended up doing almost nothing.
Hillary Clinton once in one of her phony impersonations of Malcom X at a black church in Harlem on a Martin Luther King Day characterized the Republican Party as a "plantation."

While there may be some truth to that assertion, it is chutzpah coming from a politician who lives in a community described by one resident there as lily-white by design.

The heavily African-American and in any event ethnically diverse North Shore of Staten Island is run like a political plantation by a clique of Democratic Party machine politicians, perhaps the most powerful of whom is Michael McMahon.

Like Mrs. Clinton on MLK Day in Harlem, McMahon polishes his civil rights rap when he appears before African-American audiences. It's too bad more Staten Islanders were not present in the City Council chambers, as I was in May, 2007 when the issue of the vote on a bill to change the name of a few blocks of Gates Avenue in Brooklyn to honor the late black nationalist activist Sonny Abubadika Carson came up. The street name change had been supported by many citizens in Bedford-Stuyvesant and by the local Community Board.

Council Speaker Quinn, citing some "anti-white" comments made by Mr. Carson (who is credited by his communities for having driven out the drug dealers and for having helped to create Medgar Evers College), pulled the name change out of the list for Council approval.
Councilmembers such as Charles Barron and Al Vann, both from Brooklyn, rebelled and Mr. Vann introduced a bill to restore Carson's name.

Christine Quinn, properly described by the very independent-minded City Councilmember and Mayoral candidate Tony Avella (D.-Queens) as a "prima donna", runs the Council Marie Antoinette-style. (That is one of the reasons that Mayor Bloomberg, who does not like dis- sidents, likes her so much.) And so no one expected the Council to vote to rename a few
blocks of Gates Avenue after Sonny Carson. The debate was intense and the vote defeating Vann's bill was closer than expected. The only non-African-Americans voting in favor of the name change (Gates by the way was a slaveowner) were Mr. Avella and Rosie Mendez (D.-Manhattan).

Michael McMahon is not known for his oratory. (He is well known, however, for having his name on just about every garbage can on the often littered streets of North Shore Staten Island.) As I recall McMahon had nothing positive to say about Sonny Carson.

I am no Sonny Carson but, based on McMahon's negligent and disrespectful treatment of this contituent, it is safe to say that McMahon has little positive to say about me.
The feeling is most assuredly mutual.

As far as I am concerned, McMahon's negligence as regards his doing his constituent services job and his fundamental ignorance of the Council's role as regards international issues, are legitimate campaign issue for Steven Harrison to address very publicly. At the request of Harrison's press secretary Roy Moskowitz, I have provided Mr. Harrison with a copy of the McMahon/Weiss e-mail exchange. Harrison's campaign manager Greg Collett has told me that he agrees that McMahon has not treated me fairly.

I have made it known in a reply e-mail that Mr. Harrison needs to address these issues much more publicly and assertively. If Mr. Harrison is under the impression that he will defeat the McMahon machine by pounding away at the Iraq War issue, he is wrong.

It is a fact that a small but sometimes visible group called Peace Action of Staten Island has much influience in his campaign, as it had when he lost to Fossella in 2006.

I have found Peace Action of Staten Island to be a somewhat schizoid group. To be sure,
participating in some of its marches and rallies are sincere human rights activists like Viet Nam War vet peace activist Bill Johnsen. Unfortunately PASI also contains extremists like self-described "anarchist" Mike May, the guy who, fully aware of Geoffrey Blank's propensity for politically motivated criminal behavior, nonetheless invited the neo-fascist Blank to speak at a PASI Peace "Festival" in Tappen Park in Stapleton on November 12, 2005. Everyone there, including Norman Siegel (who openly supported me in his remarks at the event), witnessed the confrontation between Blank and myself as I used my First Amendment rights to expose Blank for the fraud that he is. Only the tightly censored Staten Island Advance did not include coverage of the confrontation in Deborah Young's C-minus story that appeared on November 13.
Another PASI factor in Harrison's campaign is the explosive and seriously autocratic "peace" activist David Jones. On one occasion some months ago Jones tried to prevent me from asking a gentrification/affordable housing-related question at a Debi Rose for City Council campaign meeting he was dictatorially "facilitating." And on April 4, 2008 at a PASI event in the parking lot at the First Central Baptist Church (that, because of a scheduling conflict, I helped to reschedule) Jones objected to a polite comment I made about the non-inclusive speaker choices made by his wife Sally Jones, the de facto president of this small group. When some argumentative but hardly belligerent words were exchanged between the politically influential (and FCBC member) Larry Beslow and me, Jones went ballistic and had to be restrained from physically attacking me by another church member. Jones was so blazingly incensed that I made a complaint against him with the NYPD.

Indeed, the next time Mr. Jones saw me at a Democratic club meeting in Staten Island, he burst from his seat and loudly demanded that I be removed. Cooler heads than his soon prevailed.
In any event, at this point I do not know what role the warlike "peace" advocate David Jones is playing in the Harrison campaign.

At this point, while Mr. Harrison speaks forcefully over and over and over again on the Iraq issue as well as others, McMahon continues to gather support.

Steve Harrison will not win the primary by an Al Gore/John Kerry approach to the opposition. Mike McMahon needs to be exposed.

I don't know how much Steve Harrison wants my support and the endorsement of UP FRONT News (which has influenced elections in the past, mostly in Lower Manhattan, where I used to live).

In any event, if Mr. Harrison, adopting a Gore/Kerry approach (which in successive presi- dential elections allowed the reactionary and inept Bush to get close enough to be able to steal the elections), loses, the voters will have a chance to elect me as the congressman from the 13th C.D, as I will be a Democratic write-in candidate.

And I will be ready to debate machine Democrat McMahon and whomever the Republicans and the so-called "Independence Party" (in which LaRouche ideologue Lenora Fulani continues to have much influence, certainly in Staten Island) have to offer.
* * * * * * *

COMMUNIST MOUTHPIECE DAN MARGOLIS AND THE "HITLER WENT A LITTLE TOO FAR" ANALOGY.

UP FRONT News August 5, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

COMMUNIST MOUTHPIECE DAN MARGOLIS AND THE "HITLER WENT A LITTLE TOO
FAR" ANALOGY. THE CPUSA, ALWAYS AN ENEMY OF HUMAN RIGHTS, DEFENDS
COMMUNIST CHINA AND THE "GENOCIDE OLYMPICS." TIBET AND THE JESUS CONNECTION.

By Tom Weiss

Communist Party USA reporter Dan Margolis, with whom via No Police State Coalition list-serve co-manager Roman Shusterman, I am acquainted, demonstrates with the attached
Communist China defense that the CPUSA is in many ways essentially unchanged from what is was during Stalin's years. During Stalin's time, the CPUSA, and its house organ, then called The Daily Worker (now the People's Weekly World), were essentially an agent of a foreign power, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The extent to which the CPUSA and The Daily Worker were actually funded by the USSR is a matter of speculation.

In any case The Daily Worker literally parroted Stalin's line. Until the day that Nazi Germany and the USSR signed their non-agression pact in 1939 (which enabled Hitler to invade Poland, as Stalin invaded the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as Poland from the east), thus setting off World War II, the Communist propaganda machine labeled Hitler as a bloodthirsty fascist. On the morning after the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed, Hitler became Stalin's ally and a valued bulwark against U.S. capitalism. Stalin fed Hitler's war machine with oil and other necessities.

Within seconds after Hitler launched his invasion of the USSR ("Barbarossa") in 1941, the Communist propaganda machine, including of course the CPUSA, once again depicted its erstwhile ally as the devil incarnate.

The Russians paid a staggering price for Stalin's cynicism and stupidity (trusting Adolf Hitler) and the Germans paid a the losers' price for Hitler's psychotic notion that, while he was busy subduing western Europe (and failing in England), he could defeat the Russian winter.

Communist China, from Mao Zedong to the present, has been probably the worst human rights violator on the planet for decades, no matter what apologists such as Dan Margolis, Joel ("Stalin") Meyers and the blatantly Communist China-propagandizing wacko from Staten Island, Gary ("Enough") Phaneuf, or for that matter Communist China supporter Lyndon LaRouche may suggest.

Mao's collectivist obsession wrecked Chinese agriculture and, in combination with natural adversities, generated massive famines in which millions of Chinese starved to death. Mao murdered even more of his own people by withholding western-donated wheat from them and re-selling it at black market prices.

Mao is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Koreans and Americans in the Korean War. It was Mao, along with Stalin, who encouraged North Korea to invade South Korea. Mao promised that he would send in his "People's Liberation Army" to help the North Koreans if necessary. And that is exactly what happened as U.S. and South Korean forces repelled early North Korean advances and drove the Communists back into North Korea and very close to the Yalu River at the North Korea/China border. At that point Mao sent in his army and thousands more died until a stalemate was reached at the 38th parallel, dividing North and South Korea, exactly where the North Korean invasion began.

For the psychotic megalomaniac Mao, as with Hitler, war was an instrument of foreign and domestic policy. War protects brutal governments by inciting aggressive nationalistic fervor. The same is true in the America of Cheney/Bush, et. al. War is also helpful to regimes that starve their people because dead soldiers do not eat.

Communist China financed and supported the Khmer Rouge, which murdered an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians in a reign of terror chronicled in "Killing Fields."

Communist China, which lusts after oil in Sudan much as the U.S. lusts after oil in Iraq, is guilty of helping the government of the Sudan perpetrate genocide in Darfur.

And since Mao's invasion of independent Tibet beginning in 1949, Communist China has been perpetrating de facto racist Genocide upon a peaceful nation whose people are ethnically, culturally and linguistically distinct from the Chinese. The Chinese are light-complexioned, the Tibetans are dark-complexioned. (Mao, aside from being a pedophile, was a racist.)

The Tibetan language, unlike the Chinese tongues, is an fact derived from Aramaic and Sanskrit. The Aramaic part clearly stems from - as is reliably reported in "The Last Years of Jesus" by Elizabeth Clare Prophet and in UP FRONT News - information showing that Jesus lived in what is now Tibet, probably for an extended period of time, during the period of His life not accounted for in the New Testament. That reality may certainly explain the deep religiosity and pacifism of the Tibetan people, very well represented by the Dalai Lama, who, like Martin Luther King, is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

I think it is also the Jesus connection and the related spiritualism of the Tibetan people that explains the atheistic, repressive and materialistic Chinese Communist hatred of Tibet and explains the Genocide. Chinese Communists feel about Tibetans much as the Nazis perceived the Jews and the KKK bunch perceives African-Americans and Jews.

In 1936, Hitler managed to host the Olympics. That was accomplished with the backing of American corporations through the deal-making of international Olympic Commitee Chairman Avery Brundage, a racist from Australia. Although Brundage and Hitler had to accept the very famous African-American track star Jesse Owens, they managed to keep out Jewish runner Marty Glickman. Owens threw Hitler into a near seizure in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin by leaving the Nazi's "aryan" runners in the dust on his way to four gold medals.
New York City product Glickman later became a very famous sportscaster known for his broadcasts of City College basketball (in the years when CCNY was a national power) and other sports events.

Once again, thanks to the power of money, we have another Genocide Olympics. Just as Hitler made things image-pretty for the world in 1936, the Chinese Communists are trying to do the same in 2008, although the air pollution created by Chinese factories may affect athletes' performances.

Genocide apologist Margolis refers to the advances under Chinese Communism but acknowledges what he calls "inevitable mistakes." Apparently Margolis is unmindful of the fact that over 2 million Chinese citizens lost their homes because of the frenzy of Olympics-related real estate development in Beijing. Just a "mistake."

Perhaps the existence of at least one concentration camp in China where organs are re-moved from live political (e.g. Falun Gong) prisoners has escaped "journalist" Margolis, who would have done well perhaps writing for Josef Goebbels' "Volkischer Beobachter", the Nazi paper. Some of those body organs reportedly make up the ghoulish "Bodies" exhibit of such interest to art hipsters in New York. A "mistake."

Perhaps the fact that, according to the Dalai Lama (who, despite any claims to the contrary by the likes of Lyndon LaRouche-ite,Geoffrey Blank or his politically indentured servant Meyers, is not a CIA agent) over 1 million Tibetans have died as a direct result of the Chi- nese Communist occupation, is a "mistake."

If Margolis were writing in defense of Adolf Hitler's National Socialists, maybe he would suggest, as I once heard a Jew-hater spout, that "Hitler went a little too far."

Genocidal Chinese Communism is repulsive. And so are the arguments defending it.
* * * * * * *

LIBERATING STATEN ISLAND. ALTHOUGH I AM A DEMOCRAT THERE IS NO WAY I WILL VOTE FOR MIKE McMAHON. HE IS A REPUBLICRAT

UP FRONT News July 23, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

LIBERATING STATEN ISLAND. ALTHOUGH I AM A DEMOCRAT THERE IS NO WAY I WILL VOTE FOR MIKE McMAHON. HE IS A REPUBLICRAT, HE IS ANTI-HUMAN RIGHTS
AND HE DOES NOT DO HIS JOB.

By Tom Weiss

As many thousands of people (including the many readers of UP FRONT News) are aware, on April 7, 2005 at a now closed deli-restaurant, the 61 Cafeteria, at the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and 13th Street in Manhattan, I was assaulted by a man named Wan Yun, the night manager of that establishment. Mr. Yun is a linebacker-physiqued Korean man with a striking resemblance to "Oddjob", the major hitman in the James Bond film "Goldfinger." "Oddjob" did his lethal decapitation work by flinging his razor-brimmed fedora at Goldfinger's enemies. Wan Yun attempted to end things for me by hitting me over the head for quite some time with a glass bottle of soda.

Wan Yun was - and presumably remains - at least an acquaintance of the violent and psy- chopathic nominally Jewish anti-Semite, serial criminal and neo-fascist Geoffrey Blank, a resident of Rockaway Park, Queens. Blank has refused to discuss his role as, at the very least, an ideological surrogate for the convicted felon, racist and megalomaniac Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. LaRouche, now a resident of Loudoun County (Leesburg), Va, was often front page news in the late 20th century for his erratic political extremism, characterized by dramatic shifts from the ultra-left to the ultra-right - and, as has been the case for the Bush years - back to the ultra-left. His trial and conviction in Boston on federal mail and credit card fraud charges was front page news in The New York Times and elsewhere. LaRouche did about seven years of a longer sentence at penitentiaries in Massachusetts in more remote Rochester, Minnesota. LaRouche, often ignored by the censored mainstream media (e.g. the multi-billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance, probably the most politically censored daily paper in New York), is, despite his advanced age, in fact very active, focusing his energies on manipulating his way into total power by infiltrating the left, e.g. the Green Party, the Ralph Nader campaigns, the peace movement (especially Cindy Sheehan), the so-called "9/11 Truth" group based at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church in Manhattan, "World Can't Wait", the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the civil rights movement.

Among the more prominent LaRouche surrogates here and nationally is the African-American racist Lenora Fulani, Ms. Fulani for years, in collaboration with her LaRouche-educated mentor, the cult leader/psychotherapist "Dr." Fred Newman, has been parading as a black nationalist, parasiting her way into progressive, "independent" and "third party" movements
in New York and nationally. Fulani won't talk about her ties to the nazi LaRouche but she has given herself away on multiple occasions with her virulent anti-Semitic comments such as the one in which she claimed that the Jews, en masse, are responsible for "the murders of people of color." Aside from the fact (that the racist Fulani ignores) that the Jews are "people of color", she indicts an entire race for the crimes of some. That is what is known as racism. Adolf Hitler proceeded from the same beliefs. And so does LaRouche, perhaps one of the few political activists with a history of simultaneous collaboration with the KKK and the anti-Malcolm X wing of the Nation of Islam. Much of that information is to be found in the very unauthorized biography of LaRoche, titled "The New American Fascism" by the investigative reporter Dennis King.

There is much about the LaRouche/Fulani tie in UP FRONT News and in the work of Mr. King, whom I have met.

Like the double-talking Hillary Clinton, however, Lenora Fulani is rhetorically slick and has managed - at least with the mainstream media (which LaRouche has long infiltrated at the highest levels) - to conceal her ties to fascism. That has enabled her to sing the siren song of "independent" and third party politics, attach herself for a time to people like Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan, and then create the Independence Party of New York, with her as dictator. It has also enabled her to cozy up to Michael Bloomberg, who entered into a classic Faustian deal with the devil when he accepted her endorsement for mayor. It was the votes that then Republican Bloomberg got on the Fulani-run Independence Party ballot line that enabled him to defeat Democrat Mark Green in a very close election in 2001. Bloomberg again accepted Fulani's IPNY endorsement in 2005. In exchange the Bloomberg-controlled NYC Industrial Development Agency has awarded tax breaks to Fulani's front organization, the All-Stars Project.

Fulani's populist rhetorical skills enabled her, using surrogates such as self-described peace activist Paul ("Zool") Zulkowitz and another Green Party activist named Gerald Kann (twice the Green Party candidate for the New York City Council in Long Island City/Astoria, Queens), to literally take over the pivotal NYC Ralph Nader meetups. In fact the LaRouche strategy in the Nader campaigns has been to factionalize the left by outlefting progressives. That ultimately helps reactionaries, which is exactly what the Nader vote in Florida did in 2000. Nader (although currently electorally separated from the Greens, but not from the LaRouchite Jerry Kann) is trying to do it again this year. That political strategy was first used by Mussolini and Hitler. It is always useful to remember that Hitler did not campaign as a "conservative"; he campaigned as a "socialist."

Indeed, when I started asking questions in the Nader meetups, the response was threats and a witnessed physical assault upon me involving Kann and his thug "Green" pal George Tatevosyan, to prevent my attending a Nader Manhattan news conference the can- didate had invited me to.

Among those consistently making threats against me, which became worse when I decided to run for the U.S. Senate against Republicrat Hillary Clinton as a Democratic write-in candidate, was the demagogue Geoffrey Blank. Blank had tried to hijack a leaderless free speech group known as the No Police State Coalition which for several years had been holding speakputs in Union Square in Manhattan. Blank would grab hold of the bullhorn, spout leftist defiance against George Bush, slip in a few anti-Jewish slurs (I call Blank the "Jewzi" or Jewish nazi) and preach about "free speech." He would then turn around and explicitly threaten dissenters, usually me, if I wanted to speak. Supporting Blank were for the most part his obsequeous younger brother Jason and a de facto Stalinist/Maoist and blatant terrorism apologist with a completely totalitarian mentality named Joel Meyers.

Blank declared himself the "president" of the NPSC (a group with no officers at all) and then ran the group meetings at the 61 Cafeteria much as Stalin ran his meetings. He threatened and harassed me there on multiple occasions and received some retaliation from me - including much exposure in UP FRONT News, especially since he was occasionally the beneficiary of some puff journalism by papers like the tightly controlled "Villager" and at heavily infiltrated and in fact censored WBAI. On one occasion Blank took the bowl of soup I was having at a meeting and moved it to a remote table. I returned and dumped it in his lap to his consternation and to the apparent delight of the NPSC people there.

One night I got to the 61 Cafeteria late on a very rainy night. The meeting had ended. Wan Yun attempted to force me to take the food I had purchased outside. I refused, an argument ensued, he became psychotic and assaulted me with the bottle.

I later underwent over three hours of surgery, mostly on and in my left ear, in the Bellevue Hospital Center ER. While the surgery may have gone well, Bellevue's ineptitude and criminal negligence (an administrator name "Infante") led to my being denied post-operative care for several years. New York City probably owes me a great deal of money.

Wan Yun was arrested a few days after the attack after I prodded the initially lethargic 6th precinct. A few days later I was contacted by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Jackson. We met and after I provided a detailed description of the assualt he told me that Wan Yun would be fully prosecuted, perhaps for a felony, and that I would be the principal witness for the prosection. Jackson had me sign medical release forms authorizing him to obtain the medical information from Bellevue as well as the NYS Crime Victims Board documents. (I am CVB case #498400.)

I then told Mr. Jackson that I had information connecting the criminal extremist Geoffrey Blank to the assault. Jackson's verbatim reply was, "I don't need that." When I asked him how he could not need information the content of which he did not know, he abruptly terminated the meeting.

From that point on Jackson (who at one point insisted that all our communications be by phone, and thereby off the written record) became essentially inacessible to me. I had to go over his head and, in connection with a proposed meeting, he set a condition which could have resulted in my arrest, a condition that my attorney at the time, Jacob J. Goodman, (who has since passed away), found unacceptable.

There was no further contact with Mr. Jackson and calls and e-mails to New York County D.A. Robert Morgenthau and other higher-ups went unanswered. After I was very belatedly restored as a Bellevue outpatient, I learned that ADA Jackson had never sent the medical release forms I had signed to Bellevue. Matthew Jackson should be fired and then disbarred and the doddering Morgenthau should retire.

Among those who have helped me has been NYPD Sgt. Al Fiore, who years ago protected me from an arrest that the paranoid NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum tried to perpetrate against me at her office when I had a scheduled appointment with her Chief of Staff to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters. Gotbaum, who has adultery and CIA-related political skeletons in her closet, is nervous about me because, via a member of my family, I have been personally acquainted with her since 1979.

Indeed Sgt. Fiore, who works with the Intelligence Division of the NYPD and is very interested in politically motivated crimes - and is therefore very interested in Lyndon LaRouche, Geoffrey Blank, Paul Zulkowitz, Gerald Kann, George Tatevosyan, et. al. - arranged a meeting for me with an aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg named Katie Hart. The meeting took place at City Hall and Sgt. Fiore was present. The best thing one can say about Katie Hart is that she is very pretty. She should however be working for the NYC Department of Sanitation because all she did was to try to sweep everything under the rug.

Sgt. Fiore, however, made it clear to Ms. Hart that he is staying on the case.

And it was Sgt. Fiore who later told me that an NYPD computer showed that the case against Wan Yun (Docket# 2005 NY 047906) had been "sealed and closed." He later informed me the decision had been rendered by NYS Supreme Court Judge Ellen Gesmer.

By this time my septuagenarian lawyer, Mr. Goodman, was already in deteriorating health but providing some help and advice including about a complex appellate step that can be taken to unseal the case. I spoke also with a political friend, the prominent civil rights attorney Norman Siegel. Siegel had become familiar with my combat with the fascist Blank when he witnessed a loud confrontation between Blank and me at a November 12, 2005 "peace and justice" festival in Tappen Park in my home community of Stapleton, Staten Island to which Blank had been invited as a speaker by self-described S.I. peace "anarchist", the very hotheaded Mike May. In fact in his talk at the rally Mr. Siegel openly defended my free speech rights, rights which Blank had tried to abrogate with his LaRouche-style violence. (That is another story, "covered" after a fashion by a reporter named Deborah Young, completely blown by the Staten Island Advance.)

I followed Mr. Siegel's advice and continued to press for answers from Morgenthau. No response.

Because the problems involved apparent negligence by the government (Morgenthau, and the NYC Health & Hospitals Corporation, which operates Bellevue) my lawyer, Mr. Goodman, stating that legal action would be premature, urged me to obtain assistance from my elected officials.

The fact is that the ethnically diverse North Shore of Staten Island is run by a lily-white clique of machine Democrats, including City Councilman (and candidate for the U.S. Congress) Michael McMahon, State Assemblyman Matthew Titone, and State Senator Diane Savino. All three are officers in a Democratic Party machine run by Hillary Clinton, who does not like me, and who has indeed generated two explicit threats against me, one by phone (via her investigator "Mr. Zimmerman") and one via a defamatory and intimidating September 5, 2003 e-mail from Clinton U.S. Senate staffer Yajaira Yepez to my taciturn brother Jim in upstate New York. Mrs. Clinton does not like me because I have exposed her and her husband's direct involvement in the coverup of the Communist Chinese Genocide in Tibet.

The other major figure in the Democratic Party machine that runs the North Shore of Staten Island is NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn who, to use a prominent civil rights leader's characterization, is truly "two-faced."

Michael McMahon and gay rights-prominent Christine Quinn, politically (not biologically) speaking, comprise the equivalent of a same sex marriage. Among their offspring is the openly gay Titone, a totally negligent hack, who for months did not even answer my calls and e-mails requesting an appointment. He is one of the people who is the subject of my official communications with Melissa Ryan, the Executive Director of the NYS Legislative
Ethics Commission. (By the way I am in favor of full gay rights. But just as past military experience in and of itself is no indication of a qualification for the presidency, being gay in and of itself is no guarantee of competenece and honesty in elective office. Titone and Quinn are living proof of that axiom.

Among the people who have been helpful to me in these matters has been my pastor, the civil rights leader Rev. Demetrius Carolina of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton, of which I am a member. He knows the whole story of Matthew Titone's games.

Melissa Ryan is also learning about the operation run by Diane Savino, whose Chief of Staff, Robert Cataldo, is a seriously anger management-challenged wacko who some years ago, when I had a scheduled appointment with him in connection with an emergency situation when I was homeless, exploded in a profanity-laced tantrum and explicitly threatened me in Savino's office on the second floor at 36 Richmond Terrace. Savino has done nothing about Crazy Cataldo and in fact joined her Democratic Party machine pal Gotbaum in making defamatory comments about me published in the Staten Island Advance on August 27, 2005. And as far as her occasional appearances at the largely African-American First Central Baptist Church and its Family Life Center are concerned, only one quotation from a church leader is necessary: "She only comes around when she needs something."

In December, 2006 I met Councilman McMahon at a Christine Quinn-organized community meeting at Seaview Hospital in Staten Island. During a Q&A the real estate developer com- pliant Quinn (who has received oodles of campaign cash from the predatory mega-developers who are largely responsible for the affordable housing crisis in New York) totally evaded
the development/gentrification-related question I asked her. Quinn is also very nervous about me because she has helped Hillary Clinton continue the Tibet Genocide coverup, particularily in relation to City Council action (e.g. Councilman Tony Avella's UP FRONT News - proposed Resolution #1299) opposing the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The full story, also buried by the Advance, is in UP FRONT News.

During a break at the Seaview meeting I approached McMahon and briefly told him of my need for assistance with some serious constituent matters. He shook my hand, smiled, said, "Sure" and advised me to contact his office. When my calls to McMahon staffer JoAnne Carbone generated no response, I sent him an e-mail on December 12, 2006. My e-mail provided the necessary specifics regarding the attack, the mishandling of the Wan Yun prosecution by Robert Morgenthau and very serious problems with Bellevue. Because withheld political information generates distrust, in my e-mail I made mention of my past dealings with some of his colleagues, including Ms. Gotbaum and Ms. Quinn.

The next day I received McMahon's e-mailed reply, which should be required reading in a suggested political science course presumably called "Arrogance 101." Referring to my report that Ms. Quinn had been unresponsive to my communications regarding my proposal for a City Council resolution citing Tibet and opposing the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he wrote that it is a "waste of time" for the City Council to deal with "international affairs." That comment demonstrates both McMahon's ignorance of the Council, his hypocrisy, and his de facto hostility to human rights. (He certainly does not care a whit about my human rights either.) In fact, in 2001 the Council unanimously passed Resolution #802, proposed by me and introduced by Quinn and former City Councilmember Kathryn Freed, which denounced Communist China for its actions in Tibet. Resolution #802, however, made no mention of the Olympic Games issue, which is why I had urged Quinn, directly and via a January 30, 2006 e-mail to her via her Chief of Staff Chuck Meara, to introduce another resolution. In fact Quinn ignored me - always a political mistake. ("So you ignore Weiss at your peril." Columnist Kenneth Gross, Newsday Queens edition March 19, 1981.)

McMahon also ignores the fact that the Council, presumably with his participation, has passed a resolution condemning China for its role in aiding and abetting the Genocide in Darfur. It is my understanding that the unreconstructed Republicrat McMahon supported an early pro-Iraq War resolution in the Council.

McMahon's e-mail to me declares that he was "offended" by an UP FRONT News article in which I criticize Quinn for her non-action on the Tibet/China Olympics issue.

In any event, ignoring my attorney's urging, McMahon refused to assist me and directed me to consult a civil rights attorney. My subsequent telephone conversation with his Chief of Staff Kenny Mitchell yielded little except the reality that any acceptable manners that Mitchell may have are reserved for public occasions and perhaps meeting with real estate developers. Mitchell hopes to inherit the City Council seat being vacated by McMahon. As far as I am concerned, if City Council candidate Rev. Tony Baker, pastor of the St. Phillips Baptist Church, is really ready to act to stop the gentrification of the North Shore (which as per the plans put forth by the Downtown Staten Island Council) is in danger of a Lower Manhattan-style "Soho-ization" involving St. George, Tompkinsville, Stapleton, and Clifton, he will get my support. Like his boss McMahon, Mitchell has no chance at an UP FRONT News endorsement. And activist Debi Rose would do well to discontinue her split the African - American vote City Council campaign that can only help Kenny Mitchell and perhaps instead challenge a real loser like Matthew Titone.

Staten Island has been ill served not only by the self-serving, corrupt, lily-white Democratic Party machine on the North Shore, but congressional district-wide (all of S.I. and parts of Brooklyn) by the nearly deposed Republican Vito Fossella. McMahon presumably began to salivate about the congressional seat very shortly after the May 1 DUI arrest of Fossella as the Congressman (in fact Big Dick Cheney's man in New York) endangered the lives of others by driving while bombed on his way to his lover's house in Virginia. It is doubtful, even if Fossella had been sober at the time, that his thoughts would have been with his blissfully ignorant wife and their three kids back home in Staten Island.

It was after "family values" promoter Fossella's adultery became public that the Republicans decided that Fossella had to go. Of the two announced Democratic candidates, strongly anti-War Steve Harrison (who had run against Fossella in 2006), and City Councilman Dominic Recchia, both from Brooklyn, Recchia threw in the towel (as being caught in Quinn's slush fund beneficence didn't help).

McMahon, essentially a Reagan Democrat, also known as a Republicrat, was not about to set his opportunistic ambitions aside and let a progressive Democrat such as Steve Harrison replace Fossella - who, at least ideologically, in many ways resembles McMahon.

I have by the way discussed McMahon's serious negligence vis a vis me with UP FRONT News reader Steve Harrison and, at his request, I am providing him with a copy of the Weiss/McMahon correspondence.

Michael McMahon has cowtowed to the warmakers and also to racial imperialists with his Christine Quinn-led blatant racial gamesmanship in voting down a City Council bill introduced by Councilman Al Vann (D.-Bklyn.) to change the name of a few blocks of a Brooklyn street to honor black nationalist Sonny Carson.

Mike McMahon is also guilty of failing to do his job, which is to represent all his constituents.

There is no way I will vote for Mike McMahon.
* * * * * * *

SLIWA STANDS UP TO PHIL GRAMM AND TO THE MOB BUT MAKES NICE WITH THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE, NEW YORK'S MOST POLITICALLY CENSORED DAILY PAPER.

UP FRONT News July 15, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

SLIWA STANDS UP TO PHIL GRAMM AND TO THE MOB BUT MAKES NICE WITH THE
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE, NEW YORK'S MOST POLITICALLY CENSORED DAILY
PAPER. WILL THE ADVANCE COVER ANTI-SEMITIC RACISM AT WORKFORCE1?

By Tom Weiss

Curtis Sliwa has certainly stood up to the reactionary Republican whiner Phil Gramm and to the mob. Mr. Sliwa has in the past also served as a rhetorical alternative to the profit-driven "leftist" lawyer Ron Kuby who as far as I am able to tell has based his career largely by trying to help really guilty people get off scot-free.

Sliwa, who for a few hours floated his name as a possible Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress' 13th Congressional District (Staten Island and part of Brooklyn) to replace the fallen Vito ("Cheato") Fossella, however is unable to stand up to what may be the worst and most politically censored paper in New York, the multi-billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance. Sliwa has been engaged in a mutual adoration society with the Advance's political editor Tom ("Wrongleski") Wrobleksi, a master at the political coverup and at what is known as "yellow" journalism.

It was Tom Wrobleski who for months suppressed the news of my Democratic write-in candidacy for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton and then ended up by getting scooped on that story by Dan Janison at Newsday. Wrobleski got scooped when on August 26, 2005 in NYC Newsday Janison properly reported my rebuttal to the seriously paranoid NYC Public Advocate Betsy ("CIA") Gotbaum's televised "stalker" reference to me while Wrobleski's error-filled pro Gotbaum-slanted article appeared in the Advance on August 27.

Wrobleski has also covered up the story directly connecting Hillary and Bill Clinton to the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. Wrobleski's style of censored and slanted journalism is strongly suggestive of the approach to journalism utilized by frauds like the outwardly FDR "Democratic" political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., who, via the New York-based racist Lenora Fulani, has links to the Independence Party of New York, which is very active in Staten Island. Wrobleski, who sometimes reports on the IPNY, has mentioned not a word about the LaRouche link.

The Staten Island Advance and Wrobleski for years did puff journalism on the corruption- tainted Vito Fossella for years and only started jumping on Fossella's freshly dug political grave after the congressman got busted for DUI as he was at the wheel, bombed, on the way to his lover's house.

Wrobleski and the Advance continue to suppress the facts about corruption and violations of oaths of office by several Staten Island politicians, including Assemblyman Matthew Titone and State Senator Diane Savino, the latter being a politician who apparently continues to employ a violent man named Robert Cataldo as her Chief of Staff. Savino has earned her reputation with at least one important African-American religious and civil rights leader in Staten Island as a politician who "only comes around when she needs something."

The Staten Island Advance earns its reputation as the establishment-protecting Staten Island Retreat. One officer of the Staten Island African-American Political Association has told me that the Advance is "the most racist paper in New York." Tom Wrobleski would certainly be to an important degree responsible for that even if he sometimes goes throuigh the motions of giving a few centimeters of space to black activists such as Kelvin Alexander and Debi Rose.

And when it comes to racism only time will tell if the Advance will report on a de facto citadel of anti-Semitism at 60 Bay Street in Staten Island cleverly disguised as Workforce1, an agency run by a Texas-based corporation called Arbor Education & training in contract with the City of New York which is supposed to help people find jobs. Perhaps the Staten Island Advance would like to check out the activities of a violent and racist client there named Allen Dawson and his friend the racist Olga Gordon, both protected by a very large sadist named Anthony McCarthy, the security guard there employed th Sottile Company. And all three have been protected by Workforce1 Director Robin Johnson, an Arbor employed administator from Chicago who is so dishonest and incompetent that she probably should be working for FEMA. That matter is under government investigation.

And, by the way, Curtis Sliwa has still not answered my May 16, 2008 e-mail to him about Wrobleski. I've sent him a followup.
* * * * * * *

CHARLES RANGEL AND HIS FOUR RENT STABILIZED APARTMENTS.

UP FRONT News July 11, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

CHARLES RANGEL AND HIS FOUR RENT STABILIZED APARTMENTS. SELF-APPOINTED TENANTS RIGHTS SPOKESPERSON LOOPHOLE SPECIALIST MIKE MCKEE CRITICIZES RANGEL FOR EXPLOITING AN APPARENT LOOPHOLE

By Tom Weiss

The New York Times has broken an important tenants rights story in today's front page article by David Kocieniewski on the fact that U.S. Congressman has four rent stabilized apartments at the Olinick Organization-owned Lenox Terrace in Harlem. Mr. Kocieniewski also reports that "Vantage Properties, a company established by Olinick's former chief operating officer, has attracted billions in private equity financing by promising investors that it can aggressively convert tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments, many in Harlem." Rangel's response during a telephone interview was to say "'Why should I help you embarass me?" and then "abruptly hanging up."

It is however a measure of Mike ("The Knife") McKee's entrenched status as a tenant spokesperson (he is now the dictator of the Tenants Political Action Committee, having in the past led the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, which, in the effort to kill the much needed Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act years ago, split off from the New York Metropolitan Council on Housing) that Mr. Kocieniewski contacted him for a comment. McKee, who, according to the article, "was not aware of Mr. Rangel's situation", said, "Whether it's an elected official or not, no one should have four apartments, especially when one is being used as an office." Rangel uses one of the offices as a campaign HQ.

McKee is of course correct. What else could he say? He couldn't really admit that he is one of the people most responsible for that fact that tenants are "protected" by a rent stabilization law that has more holes than some of the best imported Swiss Cheese. And it is apparent that Olinick, Vantage Properties, like the Bush-connected Carlyle Group, et. al., are targeting rent protected tenants, fully aware of the weaknesses of the existing laws.

As far as I am concerned, no matter how many times Mike McKee is quoted in the mainstream and the so-called "alternative" media (a testament to nothing more than his entrenchment, sort of like a tapeworm, in the tenants movement) he does not represent the true interests of those of us who rent our homes. In fact with the "leadership" of politically connected people like Christine Quinn pal McKee, tenants' position has incrementally weakened substantially over the years thanks to loophole-abetted over-development and gentrification.

What is needed is a perhaps UNYTE (Union of New York Tenants)-style group, free of Mike McKee, that is ready to politically organize to get true tenant advocates elected to the mayoralty, to the State Legislature and to the City Council. Four or eight years under a mayor Quinn bode ill for tenants and would make Mike McKee and the developers quite happy.

Such a group would also need to be ready to do some serious lobbying at City Hall and in Albany. It's the only way to get rid of the loopholes. Depending on the courts can lead to for example "owner occupancy" eviction orders (e.g. in favor of avaricious landlord Alistair Ekonomakis at 47 East 3rd Street in Manhattan) and fat fees for the lawyers on both sides.

The Rangel story could develop into a major scandal. Rangel has been one of the main movers is the now battered Clinton juggernaut. Another figure in that juggernaut has been Christine Quinn. Maybe she will have "no comment" on Rangel.

In any event, if Mr. Rangel can be induced to vacate three of those apartments, and if Olnick agrees to maintain the rent structure at "stabilized" levels, maybe some non-politician real working class people can move in. According to The Times story, among Rangel's properties is a villa in the Dominican Republic worth between $250,000 and $500,000. And so, under any circumstances, Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Quinn should not harbor any concerns that Mr. Rangel will wind up in a homeless shelter.

Rangel by the way is still the Chairman of the super-powerful House Ways and Means Committee which has much to say about the distribution of the national wealth. He certainly has his ways and, considering his properties, the means.
* * * * * * *

THE ROBBER BARONS OF BASEBALL. THE NEW YORK YANKEES, DEMANDING ANOTHER $400 MILLION IN TAX DOLLARS, CONTINUE TO STEAL FROM NEW YORKERS.

UP FRONT News June 13, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

THE ROBBER BARONS OF BASEBALL. THE NEW YORK YANKEES, DEMANDING ANOTHER $400 MILLION IN TAX DOLLARS, CONTINUE TO STEAL FROM NEW YORKERS. LET A-ROD, CLEMENS ET. AL. PAY FOR THE STADIUM.

By Tom Weiss

The New York Yankees are demanding $400 million more in tax dollars to complete a new Stadium that should never have been built in the first place. The only reason for the new Stadium is the fact that the iconic existing ball park has no luxury boxes for the corporate predators who want to lord it over New Yorkers and want to watch Alex Rodriguez strike out in the clutch in executive suite-style comfort.

The new Stadium has already resulted in the destruction of two City parks. It will cause a tsunami of traffic congestion, over-development and gentrification in the economically fragile South Bronx.

If the Yankees want another $400 million, they can get it from the likes of the womanizing Alex Rodriguez, whose $30 million "annual" salary for a very part-time job can easily contribute. Perhaps Roger Clemens, who "earned" about $17 million to pitch very badly in his last egotistical season in pinstripes (for a guy who could wind up in prison stripes with Barry Bonds and a few other baseball chemists) can help out. And so can Andy Pettitte and the mega-muscled baseball chemist Jason Giambi.

And Michael Bloomberg should be able to make up the difference by just taking his hands out of our pockets and fishing some cash out of his own pockets.
* * * * * * *

DIANE SAVINO DOES NOT TELL THE TRUTH.

UP FRONT News June 6, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

DIANE SAVINO DOES NOT TELL THE TRUTH. HOW A NEW YORK STATE SENATOR IS PROTECTING A NEO-FASCIST TWO-BIT TERRORIST MULTIPLE OFFENDER, A NEGLIGENT DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND HOW THE CENSORED STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE IS PROTECTING ALL OF THEM. IS SAVINO CHIEF OF STAFF ROBERT CATALDO NUTS? LILY-WHITE CORRUPT DEMOCRATIC MACHINE LORDS IT OVER DIVERSE NORTH SHORE OF STATEN ISLAND. "CHANGE" IS COMING!

By Tom Weiss

On February 16, 2008 at a well-attended Town Hall on Black America at the First Central Baptist Church in Staten Island, I met briefly and quite privately with my State Senator Diane Savino.

I had already been in contact with her office regarding arranging a meeting with her to discuss a number of very, very serious constituent matters, involving serious violations of my human rights. She was already aware that my State Assemblyman Matthew had been unhelpful and that, in fact, in certain ways he had made things worse. She was aware that Mr. Titone and his (now former?) Chief of Staff Keith Parascandola had ignored for months my repeated requests for a meeting and tha he has even stonewalled my pastor, Rev. Demetrius Carolina of the aforementioned FCBC, as well as the NYPD, as represented by the very dedicated and competent Sgt. Al Fiore, who understands politics and politicians. Titone had also played delaying games with my advisor, Steven Gradman, a professor of political science at Touro College and a very knowledgeable and experienced progressive activist and Democrat.

Ms. Savino, in a brief conversation at the rear of the main chapel and again in the reception area of FCBC on February 16 made it explicitly clear that she will meet with me and that all I needed to do was to contact her scheduler to arrange an appointment.

Quite apparently Diane Savino - borrowing a page from her hopefully politically deposed
role model Hillary Clinton - lied.

The following excuses were offered in response to a long series of phone calls and e-mails from me. First there were some staff changes because her scheduler was pregnant. Then there was another scheduler change. Then there was the budget. I received a good deal of verbalized abuse from various staffers at the Albnay office, which she had directed me specifically to contact.
Her Staten Island district office is run Benito Mussolini-style by her Chief of Staff, the ap- parently recurrently violent - and perhaps psychotic - Robert Cataldo.

You see, a number of years ago when I was homeless and had my hotel rent money stolen, as a Social Security recipient, I was in need of an expedited Social Security check, which according to the law can be issued in emergency situations. A request must be made by a representaitve (e.g. a religious leader, an elected official) to the Commissioner of the U.S. Social Security Administration (not to a local or regional official) who has offices in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

On previous occasions I was able to receive urgently needed expedited checks with the help of Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell, the (now retired) Pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Flushing Queens (of which I have been a member for many years) and on a subsequent occasion (via a high-level connection) U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton.

On this most recent occasion Sen. Clinton, by now fully aware of my work on blowing the whistle on the U.S. coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet (a coverup directly involving Bill Clinton and top level officials of his administration), refused to assist me. In fact she responded to inquiries from me and from my brother Jim in upstate New York with explicit threats against me - one by telephone to me and one by a September 5, 2003 e-mail to my brother (who doesn't want to talk about it).

My Assemblyman at the time, John Lavelle, assigned the matter to his Chief of Staff, the aforementioned Parascandola, who, after much delaying, faxed a letter to the SSA Commis- sioner and then refused to follow it up, instead referring me to (Big Dick) Cheney's man in New York, U.S. Congressman Vito Fossella, who completely mishandled the entire thing.

I therefore went to Diane Savino, met briefly with staffer Tanya Jones-Sullivan, who gave me an appointment with Mr. Cataldo, although still leaving me just about penniless.

When I arrived for my appointment at 36 Richmond Terrace, a short distance from the ferry, only Mr. Cataldo was in the office.

As soon as he saw me, he burst out of his chair from behind his desk and essentially went berserk. In a perhaps two minute profanity-laced tirade littered with the f-word, Cataldo ad- vanced in a distinctly menacing manner towards me and, almost foaming at the mouth, ordered me to leave the office or he would have me arrested.

The next day I called Savino, who happened to pick up the phone. She told me "don't worry about Cataldo" and the proceeded to leave me cashless by accessing a local Social Security official (whose name she refused to disclose to me) who predictably advised her that (s)he could do nothing. Savino refused to access the SSA Commissioner's office.

As far as I am concerned, that incident alone is sufficient reason for Ms. Savino to be removed from office. As far as Cataldo is concerned, despite some initial resistance at the recurrently crime-tolerant 120th precinct, with some high level help, I was able to make certain that Robert Cataldo has a criminal record.

Whether or not this ordinarily smooth-talking arrogant and corrupt Chief of Staff is being helped psychiatrically I do not know.

It is clear however that Diane Savino - along with her other mounting political deficits (she was one of the most vocal supporters of her sister in deceit Hillary Clinton, even as certainly most of the many African-Americans, and me, in her district supported Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination) is a very poor judge of character as she continues to my knowledge to employ the seriously psychologically impaired Cataldo as her Chief of Staff.

Some weeks ago, accompanied by my not very physically imposing friend Peter Schultheis as a de facto bodyguard, having been stonewalled by Savino's Albany office as regards the appointment she had promiosed me on February 16, I stopped in at 36 Richmond Terrace.
Greeting me with uncharacteristic humility was Cataldo, deep in 5 o'clock shadow.

To make a long story short he asked me to provide the agenda for my meeting with his boss. I did.

It involves, among other violations of my rights, the fact that the New York County District Attorney, the apparently marginally functional Robert Morgenthau (who seems, largely because of machine power and voter apathy, to have been in office since the Book of Numbers), willfully mishandled case docket # 2005 NY 047906, the prosecution of Wan Yun, an "Oddjob" - resembling (remember the James Bond classic "Goldfinger?") who violently assaulted me on April 7, 2005. The unindicted co-conspirator in the assault (although he was not present at the time, important in consideration of the reality that, as far as history is aware, Adolf Hitler was not physically present at any of the murders he is responsible for) was and is Wan Yun acquaintance Geoffrey Blank.

Geoffrey Blank was already guilty of a multiplicity of criminal harassments against me, several of them at the No Police State Coalition Union Square speakouts that Blank tried to hijack, while singing the virtues of such role models as Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other tyrants. Geoffrey Blank, promoting the racist ideology of another role model, the convicted federal felon and Germany-worshiping megalomaniac Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., would stand in Union Square preaching "free speech" and sometimed physically attack others (e.g.) me who sought to exercize that right. Blank is said to be born Jewish, but with the possible exception of another LaRouche-ite role model, the psycho-psycho-therpist and cult ("social therapy") leader "Dr." Fred Newman, I have never met a more thoroughly self-hating Jew than Geoffrey Blank. He is a Jewish nazi - or, as noted in a now some what underground-legendary UP FRONT News headline - "Jewzi." (But then, if I were Geoffrey Blank I'd hate myself too.)

After Wan Yun's arrest, done by an initially lethargic 6th precinct, I met with Assistant District Attorney Matthew Jackson. Jackson took a detailed description of an assault that led to over three hours of surgery at Bellevue - and, perhaps because of major post-operative negligence and criminality by a smallish but violent Bellevue Adminstrator named "Infante", has left me hearing impaired. (It is NYS Crime Victims Bureau case # 498400.) He said he planned to prosecute Wan Yun as a felon and that I would be the chief prosecution witness at trial. Jackson had me sign release forms authorizing him to obtain my medidal record and Crime Victims paperwork from Bellevue. (As I have since learned from Bellevue Administration and medical records Jackson never sent the forms.)

And then I offered him evidence connecting Geoffrey Blank to the crime. Jackson's response was, verbatim, "I don't need that." When I asked him how he could not need evidence the content of which he did not know, he abruptly ended the interview.

From that point on I faced a campaign of stonewalling by the DA's office.

Things were made more difficult for me thanks to the paranoia of none other than NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, a quite secretive and dishonest person with whom, via a family member of mine, I've been personally acquainted since 1979. Ms. Gotbaum, who wants to be mayor (yeesh!), upon becoming fully aware of my work as a free lance investigative reporter, once tried to have me arrested as I was at her office for a scheduled appointment with her Chief of Staff at the time Scott Coccaro to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters.

The police officer called to arrest me was none other than the aforementioned Sgt. Fiore, who had never met me previously. It took Sgt. Fiore perhaps 15 minutes of interviewing me to realize that Gotbaum's claims that I had made some kind of "threat" against Linda Gibbs, Michael Bloomberg's arrogant and homeless abuse-condoning Commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services (she holds and even higher job with Bloomberg now: yeesh!) were nonsense. Sgt. Fiore told me to go home and leave Betsy Gotbaum alone for awhile.

Ms. Gotbaum's paranoia about investigative reporters like me who know about her may be
explained by the fact that she is linked (at least by one failed marriage) to the CIA. That is a fact that she tried to keep secret until first reported in UP FRONT News. The Times and other mainstream media got to the story later. In fact UP FRONT News consistently gets to stories, e.g. the (Clintons, et. al. direct involvement in the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet and the connection to the Beijing Genocide Olympics) that are suppressed and/or under-reported and/orcensored out of the corporate mainstream (e.g. NBC, Staten Island Advance, Sports Illustrated, New York Times, New York Post) and "alternative" (e.g. Village Voice) media.

And as far as Betsy Gotbaum is concerned, she is now much in the media, not for her publicity stunts in her capacity as the negligent and secretive NYC Public Advocate but in connection with the death at the Phoenix, Ariz. airport of Carol Anne Gotbaum, who was married to Betsy Gotbaum's stepson Noah. A reportedly intoxicated Carol became reportedly out of control while awaiting a connecting flight to a substance abuse treatment facility and was arrested by the Phoenix Police. She died when left alone shackled to a holding cell fixture. The available evidence suggests that she choked when trying to get the chain over her head.

Betsy Gotbaum is suing the Phoenix Police Department. The Phoenix police may well have to explain why an acutely distressed person under arrest was left alone. And Betsy Gotbaum, a profoundly narcissistic individual who lusts after power and money (sort of like Hillary Clinton), may have to explain why Carol Gotbaum was traveling alone thousands of miles away from home.

Because of the Betsy Gotbaum incident vis a vis me and in light of Robert Cataldo's near assault on me as described, my laywer Jacob J. Goodman (who has since passed away), when I received an invitation to meet with ADA Matthew Jackson and his superior William Mahoney, advised me not to go to any meeting with a government official in a government building without a prior written guarantee that I will not be arrested or otherwise harassed. Jackson, in an e-mail to me, refused to provide a guarantee and so there was no meeting.

Ultimately, with much assistance from Sgt. Fiore - and none from Assemblyman Titone - I learned that there had been a "sealed" disposition of the case by a NYS Supreme Court Judge from the Bronx named Ellen Gesmer.

As my lawyer was in increasingly deteriorating health and could only provide minimal help, I consulted hurriedly with for example civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, with whom I am quite well politically acquainted and is among the people who knows how psychologically impaired and dishonest Betsy Gotbaum is. (Gotbaum once contacted Siegel during her 2001 race for Public Advocate and claimed I was "stalking" her. She then made things much, much, much worse by referring to me in that way on television during the 2005 Public Advocate race. And making it still worse was the fact that one of the most dishonest people parading as a reporter, Tom ("Wrongleski") Wrobleski of the Staten Island Advance, wrote a pro-Gotbaum slanted and error-riddled article on August 27, 2005 about the Gotbaum vs. Weiss matter in which Diane Savino defamed me also. There were far more accurate stories on that in NYC Newsday on August 26, 2005 (by Dan Janison) and on August 27 in the Daily News (Celeste Katz) and The New York Times (Jonathan Hicks).

And as far as "stalking" Ms. Gotbaum is concerned, aside from the fact that I have never stalked anyone in my life, the notion of stalking Betsy Gotbaum, as I have written previously, conjures up for me mainly the great country song by Dwight Yoakum, "I Ain't That Lonely Yet."

Also Ms. Gotbaum (who aside from the CIA connection she has tried to hide also has some Great Neck, Long Island adultery in her sleazy past) needs to make public the apology to me that she had an aide telephone secretly to my friend and UP FRONT News associate Arthur Ashe look-alike historian/writer/bartender Willard Whittingham.

Ms. Savino, at my insistence, without meeting with me, wrote a letter to Robert Morgenthau (not to my knowledge followed up) and also one to NYU Medical Center executive Director Dr. Robert Grossman (on another violation of my human rights, by the NYU Dental Clinic that led to a complaint by me to the NYS Department of Health that was later fully "substantiated"). Cataldo then messed up badly by ignoring my insistence that he insist on only written responses from NYU by violating my confidentiality by discussing the matter over the phone with NYU Medical Center Administration, in fact making the situation worse. If Cataldo had done something like that as a social worker, he would probably be fired, brought up on ethics charges, and have his license at least suspended.

But this is the New York State Legislature, where ethics is regarded as most people regard the Bubonic Plague. That is why Assembly Speaker, the reportedly God-fearing Sheldon Silver (D.-Manh.) has, at least as far as I am aware, done nothing about the awful Matthew Titone. It also explains the lack of action by the State Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith (D.-Manh.) and the Deputy Minority Leader Jeffrey Klein (D.-Bx.), who have been made fully aware of the Savino/Cataldo problem by me.

Cataldo has since stonewalled Rev. Carolina, Sgt. Fiore and me as regards the explicitly promised meeting with Savino. Robert Cataldo is one reason why the New York State Legislature deserves its rating of "the worst state legislature in the country." And it seems that the worst legislators in "the worst state legislature in the country" may be in the colony known as Staten Island.

Diane Savino, Assemblyman Titone and the really, really arrogant City Councilman and Congressional wannabe Michael McMahon make up the lily-white ruling class of the Demo- cratic Party machine that runs the North Shore like a fiefdom. McMahon's obsequeousness to the imperious City Council Speaker (and Hillary loudmouth) the Slush Fund Queen and mayoral wannabe (more yeesh! ) Christine Quinn was revoltingly evident as Quinn sabotaged Beford- Stuyvesant's wish for part of a neighborhood street to be named after the late black nationalist Sonny Carson. Michael McMahon is also in violation of his constituent responsibilities to me as in December, 2006 he refused to assist me with these matters because, as he put it in one of the most arrogant e-mails (to me) ever paid for by the taxpayers, I had criticized the Flighty Quinn in UP FRONT News. Michael McMahon, a "Democrat" in the Richard Daley/Carmine DeSapio, mold, wants to be the Congressman to replace the Fallen Fossella.

As far as I am concerned, even if he keeps his libido under better control than the perhaps more easily arousable "family values"-promoting (Big Dick) Cheney pal Republican "Cheato" Vito, Michael McMahon is fundamentally unqualified to be a U.S. Congressman and would do well to allow term limits to end his political career.

Savino/Titone/McMahon make up what is an essentially racially segregated feudal "government" in Staten Island that is fundamentally insensitive to the needs of many of the citizens in the very ethnically diverse North Shore of Staten Island.

Apparently more independent of this somewhat Jim Crow-style political arrangement is State Assemblywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer. Indeed, she is clearly in better psychological shape than the arrogant and fear-riddled Titone/Savino/McMahon clique Ms. Hyer-Spencer has helped me out some. Ms. Hyer-Spencer, however, apparently wants to keep that fact secret so as not to anger the machine. At that rate she will never become the congresswoman she told me (before the Fall of Fossella) that she wants to be by winning the 2010 election.

In any case, Diane Savino needs to at least get mental health help for Robert Cataldo (or fire him if he refuses such help) and start telling the truth and send me (and Rev. Carolina, Sgt. Fiore, and Mr. Gradman) an early e-mail with the suggested date and time to meet with me.

Look at what all the lying got for Hillary Clinton.
* * * * * * *

OPEN LETTER TO THE TENANTS MOVEMENT. SUPPORT THE 47 EAST 3rd STREET TENANTS. CLOSE THE LEGISLATIVE LOOPHOLES AND EXILE MIKE McKEE.

UP FRONT News July 8, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

OPEN LETTER TO THE TENANTS MOVEMENT. SUPPORT THE 47 EAST 3rd STREET
TENANTS. CLOSE THE LEGISLATIVE LOOPHOLES AND EXILE MIKE McKEE. "FLYNN-DEARIE" REDUX?

By Tom Weiss

I was among those who attended the April, 2007 rally in front of the Ekonomakis-owned 47 East 3rd St. in support of the eviction-threatened tenants of that Manhattan building.

As far as I am concerned, the Court of Appeals decision affirming the landlord's right to proceed with an "owner occupancy" eviction, in no way negates the reality that the Alistair and Katherine Ekonomakis are very greedy people. It is also a fact that the Ekonomakises are benefiting not from a bad court decision but rather from the continued existence of one of the many landlord-favoring loopholes in the rent stabilization laws. The law allows landlord's to displace rent protected tenants in the name of "owner occupancy." The courts cannot make law. Only the state legislature can do that.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the April, 2007 rally was that one of the speakers was self-appointed tenant "leader" Mike McKee. (In fact, the best speech that day was delivered by tenant activist Monte Schapiro, whose landlord on East 5th St. is the avaricious Ben Shaoul.) After his pseudo-populist talk, McKee shifted his baseball cap down over his eyes as he slunk to the rear of the rally to chat with his ally Julie Miles of "Housing Here and Now", after I used my First Amendment rights to expose him in front of all those people.

Other than some major landlord-developer lobbyists and their henchpeople in (s)elected office, such as tenants rights-spouting but real estate developer supporting and racially insensitive (Sonny Carson street name change in Bedford-Stuyvesant) City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, there may be no one who has been more inimical to tenants' interests than the de facto fifth columnist Mike ("The Knife") McKee.

The details of how McKee on multiple occasions helped to defeat what was perhaps the strongest piece of tenants rights legislation ever, known as the Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act, appear exclusively in UP FRONT News. In sum, Flynn-Dearie, introduced on multiple occasions late in the 20th century, would have required any landlord seeking a rent increase for any reason to prove need by opening his or her books for auditing by the state. Since the landlords had been cooking their books for several millennia, that provision was anathema to the landlord lobby. The landlords got a valuable ally in Mike McKee who announced his opposition to Flynn-Dearie, declaring the "open the books" requirement "too cumbersome." McKee split off from the Flynn-Dearie-supporting New York Metropolitan Council on Housing to form the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition, thereby ending unity in the tenants movement in New York. In fact, unlike much other tenants rights legislation which dies in the Republican-controlled State Senate, Flynn-Dearie could have passed because its co-sponsor, Sen. John Flynn of Yonkers, was a high ranked Republican. John Dearie was a State Assemblyman from the Bronx. (Indeed I even traveled to Albany and to then Senate Majority Leader Warren Anderson's hometown of Binghamton to try to save Flynn-Dearie.)

McKee later worked with his fellow collaborator in the lofts, Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants dictator Chuck ("Ol' Loophole") Delaney, to delay and weaken loft tenant protection legislation, which explains the massive gentrification in loft districts such as Soho, Noho, Tribeca and DUMBO. In the lofts because of a rent increase pass-along provision inserted into the loft bill by McKee's and Delaney's friends in Albany, it has been possible to raise rents in the loft by 300% or more under rent stabilization.

Having been a victim if major landlord (Thomas Berger) and judicial (Christine Quinn pal Marilyn Shafer) abuse in my former loft home at 190-A Duane St. (where I lived for over 16 years, 5 1/2 of them without heat or water), I am very supportive of the tenants at 47 East 3rd St.

What is needed, however, is most certainly no speeches by frauds like McKee (or for that matter one his supporters in politics, the developer campaign contribution-financed mayoral wannabe Quinn).

We need a united (UNYTED?, i.e. the Union of New York Tenants, still on life support) tenant movement that will lobby for laws without loopholes.

And let infiltrators like Mike McKee go back to the right wing Manhattan Institute where he (no comment from McKee) belongs.
* * * * * * *

DON’T MANSION IT. PUSHING TENANTS AROUND

UP FRONT News March 29, 2007
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
“The paper that can’t be bought and can’t be sold.” http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

DON’T MANSION IT. PUSHING TENANTS AROUND

While I support the efforts of the rent stabilized tenants at 47 East 3rd Street in Manhattan facing eviction by a landlord who wants to convert the building into a mansion for his family, I wonder about their legal strategy. An Appellate Court unanimously ruled that there is nothing in the rent stabilization law that requires a landlord seeking to displace tenants to move in his own family to obtain prior approval from the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Unless the judges missed something, the ruling suggests that the DHCR-based strategy was faulty.

What is really faulty are laws that inadequately protect tenants from greedy landlords. And since among the professions, landlords and developers (with some exceptions) have very high rates of greediness, the laws need to be strengthened. It seems that a landlord claiming a very, very extended family can displace a multiple dwelling full of rent stabilized tenants for that clan. As far as I am concerned, a law that permits this kind of thing is an invitation to greed and abuse. At a recent community meeting, an aide to State Senator Tom Duane told me that legislation is being developed. He will need Republican support.

The reality is that existing rent protection laws favor landlords. Landlords are in it for one reason, profit. Profits are made through rent increases, cost cutting, and displacement encouragement. As long as landlords do not have to open their book in order to get rent increases, the system is biased. Cooking the books is a way of life for landlords. I know, having been hounded by a rent gouger, greed merchant and political insider loft-lord named Thomas Berger for 16 years.

For many years late in the last millennium, former State Senator John Flynn (R.-Yonkers) and former State Assemblyman John Dearie (D.-Bx) introduced the Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act, which, had it been enacted, would have made opening landlord books into the law. The legislation was repeatedly killed by the combination of the real estate lobby, upstate Republican indifference and sellout artist tenant “advocate” Mike McKee. McKee, a master at blending militant “left” rhetoric and simultaneously helping the landlords, argued that “opening the books” for state auditing was “too cumbersome.” McKee and his sellout pal Chuck Delaney who ran the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants, also so delayed and weakened a loft bill that the gentrification of neighborhoods like SoHo, NoHo, Tribeca, and DUMBO was accomplished somewhat incrementally.

Delaney was also involved in an important case in which the tenants pursued a dubious legal strategy. Loft tenant Mario Pikus argued that since his landlord, Thomas Berger pal eli Lipkis, did not have a residential Certificate of Occupancy, he did not have to pay rent. That argument suggests that a landlord potentially pauperize himself by investing the necessary money in order to render the building “up to code” for the “C of O.” While Pikus and Delaney railed against the landlord at LMLT meetings, the case went to New York’s highest court, The Court of Appeals, and Pikus wound up moving to California, while Delaney remained in his very, very affordable Pearl Street loft and the lawyers presumably made a lot of money.

In a huge city with so many tenants, it is encouraging that there are activists who are ready to organize independently of people like Mike McKee. Maybe it will finally be possible to enact laws that will truly protect people like those at 47 East 3rd Street.
*********

MIKE McKEE VS. TENANTS. HOW McKEE HELPS KEEP THE LANDLORD BOOKS CLOSED. THE FLYNN-DEARIE STORY.

UP FRONT News March 19, 2007
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
“The paper that can’t be bought and can’t be sold.” http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/upfrontnewsdiscussionforum

It is axiomatic that in any kind of war, economic, political, or military, infiltration is a key part of any strategy. And, when it comes to infiltration in the real estate developer/landord vs. tenants wars, the landlords have for decades been well served by the duplicitous tenants rights “advocate” and “spokesperson” Mike McKee. McKee created the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition years ago to split a NYC tenant movement led, at the time, by the New York Metropolitan Council on Housing. The central issue was, and remains, major: making rent increases contingent upon landlords’ “opening their books.”

Late in the last millennium, the New York State Legislature, with McKee’s help, repeat-
edly arranged for the death of the oft-introduced Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act. The bill would have, aside from other provisions, required any landlord of a residential multiple dwelling to prove the need for any rent increase by submitting his or her books for auditing by New York State. The landlord lobby, protecting a constituency in which books are regularly cooked in order to create the illusion of owner indigence, view such a law as Communism. And McKee supported them by promoting the landlord argument that auditing would be “too cumbersome.” Tell that to the IRS.

The Flynn Dearie Rent Protection Act was introduced repeatedly by State Senator John Flynn, (R-Yonkers) and Assemblyman John Dearie (D.-Bronx). The fact that it was sponsored by a veteran Republican meant that, unlike much other “progressive” legisla- tion, which dies in the Senate, Flynn-Dearie could have passed. Mike McKee made certain that Flynn-Dearie would die many legislative deaths. Tenants have therefore been left with a loophole-riddled “rent stabilization” system, which features the Rent Guidelines Board hearings circus at which the tenants correctly accuse the rent increase-demanding landlords of lying about their finances but unable to prove it. Rent-flation, gentrification, displacement and homelessness have been the inevitable results. Mike McKee is one of those most responsible for the displacement of residential loft tenants over the years that has paved the way for the tsunami of gentrification that has luxurized neighborhoods such as Soho, Noho, Tribeca, DUMBO, and Long Island City. Spouting militant anti-landlord rhetoric, while refusing to talk to Republicans, McKee and his pal Chuck Delaney, the dictatorial self-appointed leader of the loft tenants, managed to so delay and weaken a loft tenant protection bill that many lost their homes while rent gouging and “stabilization” in the lofts went hand in hand. Indeed, Delaney worked quite closely with the politically formidable Thomas Berger, the founder and president of the loftlord lobby known as the Association of Commercial Property Owners (ACPO), a buddy of Ed Koch, and my avaricious, crime-connected landlord at the time.

Reliable rumor has it that Mike McKee’s political associations include the right wing think tank known as the Manhattan Institute. On those occasions when I’ve raised the question with him he has looked way and responded with silence.

Mike McKee, who at the very least uses the divisive, autocratic, and sometimes cri-
minal tactics blended with populist rhetoric characteristic of Lyndon LaRouche activists,
is recurrently derided as “pushy”, "obnoxious”, etc. by other tenant activists. In fact, Mike McKee is more dangerous than that. He has sometimes been the fourth person present with the “three men in a room” (Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and whomever happens to be governor) deciding legislation when others have been shut out. The fact that he has been warmly complimented by the developer-friendly and autocratic City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is in itself ominous.

McKee does not belong in any true tenants’ rights movement. He is better off at the Manhattan Institute.
* * * * * * *

THE AUDACITY OF A DOPE: ASSEMBLYMAN MATTHEW TITONE SENDS ME SOME PROPAGANDA BY MAIL.

UP FRONT News July 16, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforumhttp://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

THE AUDACITY OF A DOPE: ASSEMBLYMAN MATTHEW TITONE SENDS ME SOME PROPAGANDA BY MAIL. THE FACTS ON THE WORST LEGISLATOR IN "THE
WORST STATE LEGISLATURE IN THE COUNTRY." WHY DOESN'T CIVIL RIGHTS
ACTIVIST DEBI ROSE RUN FOR THE SEAT THAT TITONE MAY THINK BELONGS
TO HIM?

By Tom Weiss

Yesterday I received some mailed propaganda at my home in Stapleton, Staten Island, from State Assemblyman Matthew Titone, perhaps the most negligent and most corrupt of the politicians being protected by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, one of the principal powerbrokers in what has properly been rated as "the worst state legislature in the country."

Things are for sure not much better in the State Senate where the leadership has been pro- tecting State Senator Diane Savino, (D.-S.I.) whose Chief of Staff, Robert Cataldo has had at least one totally psychotic outburst - in my presence. Some years ago, when I was homeless, I had been robbed of my hotel rent money and was in need of a letter from a local official to the Commissioner of the U.S. Social Security Administration to obtain an expedited S.S. check. Communist China-friendly Hillary Clinton, (who on a previous occasion had assisted me in this way), by then aware of my activism in support of a Free Tibet, had refused to help me. Indeed, Mrs. Clinton accompanied that refusal with a couple of explicit threats against me, one by phone (via her investigator "Mr. Zimmerman") and once by a September 5, 2003 e-mail to my quite easily intimidated brother Jim in upstate New York.

State Assemblyman John Lavelle - whose Chief of Staff was Keith Parascandola, who, following the death of Mr. Lavelle, became Chief of Staff to Titone - had completely mishandled the matter. Cataldo greeted me at my scheduled appointment with him at Savino's district office on the second floor at 36 Richmond Terrace, a short distance from the St. George Ferry Terminal, in an otherwise empty office, by bursting out of his chair, moving towards me in a distinctly threatening and menacing manner and exploding into a profanity and threat-laced tantrum accompanied by a threat to have me arrested if I did not leave at once. I did.

Not too long after that I called Savino's Albany office, where she was at her part-time job as a State Senator. She happened to answer the phone. In response to my description of what had happened in her office, Diane Savino said, "Don't worry about Cataldo." She then proceeded to willfully mishandle the Social Security matter by insisting on contacting a regional SSA official (whom she refused to identify) in New York rather than, as required by law, the Commissioner's office in Baltimore and/or Washington, D.C. I ended up almost penniless and had to borrow money from my pastor, Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell in Queens and from my closest friend, UP FRONT News Editorial Advisor Willard Whittingham in the Bronx.

As far as I am aware, not only has Diane Savino explicitly lied to me as regards a promised appointment with her to discuss a number of issues involving major violations of my human rights, as far as I am aware, she still employs the (at least occasional) madman Cataldo at taxpayer expense.

Back to Titone. When my late Attorney Jacob J. Goodman, advised me to access my elected officials in connection New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's mishandling of the prosecution of neo-fascist Geofffey Blank acquaintance Wan Yun's major physical assault on me on April 7, 2005, and the subsequent post-operative negligence at Bellevue Hospital Center, I first approached Titone, who, as per a (s)election process run by the Democratic Party machine, had succeeded Lavelle in the Assembly.

In fact for months Titone refused to respond to numerous phone calls and e-mails from me.
His first response came only after a reluctant and timid intervention by (former) Sheldon Silver aide Jessica Loeser. I had been introduced to Ms. Loeser (whose husband Stu is Mayor Bloomberg's Press Secretary, the proverbial "power marriage) by my friend and advisor Steven Gradman, a Democratic political progressive, who was the Media Coodinator for my Democratic write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate against Republicrat Hillary Clinton.

It took months and the direct internvention by the somewhat machine-independent Assem- blywoman Janele Hyer-Spencer (D.-S.I.), the New York Police Department and my pastor (since I've moved to Staten Island) Demetrius Carolina of the First Central Baptist Church in Stapleton before Titone met with me. And at two meetings, both taking place at Rev. Carolina's church, Titone has done little other than make some veiled threats of non-assistance because, as he put it, I have "embarassed" him in UP FRONT News, read not only through-out Staten Island, the other four boroughs and beyond, but also quite widely by news editors, reporters and politicians in New York, Albany, and Washington.

In response to my Rev. Carolina-supported request for assistance in dealing with the negli- gence at Morgenthau's office, Titone wrote a seriously flawed belated letter to Morgenthau and, as far as I am aware, never followed it up. In response to my request for help in connection with the fact of major health-depriving negligence at Bellevue Hospital Center, where I underwent over three hours of surgery following the attack by the terrorism-linked Geoffrey Blank's pal Wan Yun, Titone also wrote a totally inadequate letter and never followed it up. In response to a number of other serious matters, Titone has done absolutely nothing.

Matthew Titone has the "audacity of a dope" to send me a mailing about his efforts at "Keeping Staten Island kids safe" in connection with some of his legislation aimed at child molesters.

This reminds me of a quotation in a recent New York Post. Overpaid New York Yankee third baseman and womanizer Alex Rodriguez was spotted sort of leering at the rear of a shapely woman walking ahead of him in Midtown Manhattan. (It's caught on camera.) In response to the reporter's question about his prurient interests, Rodriguez said he is leaving it all in the
hands of "the good Lord." Talk about taking the Lord's name in vain!

Matthew Titone, the protector of innocent little children, is the same kind of hypocrite as many of his colleagues in politics - as well as A-Rod.

Matthew Titone is guilty of gross negligence as a state assemblyman, in which capacity it is his job to represent all his constituents, even if they oppose Hillary Clinton. He wants to look good by protecting little children from the criminals. He doesn't seemed to care as much about protecting law-abiding citizen journalists from the likes of Wan Yun, Geoffrey Blank - or for that matter Robert Cataldo.

The best thing for Matthew Titone to do his to follow the example of another phony, U.S. Congressman Vito Fossella, and not run for re-election. As regards replacements, although
for some reason reason civil rights activist Debi Rose continues to insist on pursuing her no chance candidacy of the City Council, for which Rev. Tony Baker of the St. Phillips Baptist Church in Port Richmond seems to be the most most human rights-oriented announced candidate, Ms. Rose would be an immeasurably improvement over the really bad Titone.

No wonder Matthew Titone complains about being "embarassed" in UP FRONT News. He is an embarassment.

As I have said and written Matthew Titone may well be the worst legislator in "the worst state legislature in the country." Even if he is public-relations nice to children.
* * * * * * *

THE FRAUDS: A SERIES. CITY COUNCIL SPEAKER CHRISTINE QUINN THE QUINNBERG ADMINISTRATION: A SAME HEX MARRIAGE

UP FRONT News June 24, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

This is part of what is likely to be a continuing series focusing on for the most part the politically fraudulent. By that I am referring to people, mostly in politics, who present themselves as human rights advocates but are in fact only in it for themselves.

In light of the conclusion of the most recent immorality play known as the NYC Rent Guidelines Board hearings, which predictably worsened the "rent-flation" crisis, and the consequent and inevitable "tenants rights" grandstanding by the Speaker of the New York City Council Christine Quinn, this article on political frauds focuses on Ms. Quinn, a major component of what I refer to as the Quinnberg Administration.

Among the reporters who serve essenatially as press agents for the Quinnberg Administration is Sally Goldenberg. Ms. Goldenberg until recently was the City Hall reporter for the
Staten Island Advance, perhaps the most politically censored daily paper in New York. The Advance, whose lead censor is political editor Tom ("Wrongleski") Wrobleski, is owned by media mogul Donald Newhouse, one of the 100 richest men in America and a guy who seems to regard the First Amendment as perhaps an attachment to the Communist Manifesto. I've talked by telephone with the Conde-Nast-connected Newhouse; the guy is a robot and it is no surprise that his Staten Island paper is widely known as the Staten Island Retreat because of its habitual suppressing of stories that can change the system. The Advance has been protecting a entrenched clique of (mostly Democratic) politicians on the North Shore for years and only began to uncover the corrupt Republican Vito Fossella after Dick Cheney's favorite Congressman from New York City got busted for DUI on the way to his lover's house.

Sally Goldenberg, presumably for more mogul money, is now working for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. In her story on the recent Rent Guidelines Board hearing, Goldenberg asserted that Quinn "fiercely" spoke of for tenants rights. Yeesh!

It is a fact that the very, very, very, very developer-friendly Quinn has made something of a rhetorical career out of spouting anti-landlord militance at tenants rallies and meetings. In this she is joined by her ally, the self-purported tenants rights spokesperson Mike ("The Knife") McKee.

During the years of the Quinnberg Administration, New Yorkers have been assaulted, and sometime killed (e.g. crane accidents), by what has become a tsunami of development of what New York City least needs, luxury housing. Bloomberg and Quinn have essentially told the most rapacious real estate developers and their corporate allies (e.g. in the sports world, such as George Steinbrenner and the Quinn-supported mega tax giveaway known as the new Yankee Stadium), "The City is yours, build and the rich will come. We have shelters and drop-in centers for the poor and the displaced working middle class can go to New Jersey." Bloomberg and Quinn are giving the most economically and culturally diverse city in the world away to the developers and turned our town over to the people who constitute the true "Gangs of New York."

In order to be at least somewhat politically correct in a city where there are large numbers of tenants who vote, Quinn and her "same hex" marriage partner Bloomberg offer small per-centages of what is euphemistically called "affordable" housing.

At the same time, tottering and lethal cranes help to erect obscene and unneeded high rises while acres of apartments are warehoused. The MTA moguls get free EZ passes so they don't have to ride the subways as they consider the next totally unjustifiable fare increase. And Queen wannabe Quinn presides over a slush fund operation that would do another Queen, Marie Antoinette, proud.

Working class neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side/Chinatown in Manhattan and Stapleton (where I live) in Staten Island have the developers literally salivating as they finance the campaign funds of people like Christine Quinn. The Lower East Side has experienced an onslaught of luxury housing and hotelization with the accompanying commercial gentrification that has led to bar proliferation. That greed-motivated phenomenon has generated protests led by people like LES community activists Rebecca Moore and Susan Howard, among others. Indeed the musician Moore, with whom I am personally acquainted, recently led a protest (covered briefly in The New York Times and the New York Post) in front of the grotesquely upscale Varvatos boutique that replaced the ousted CBGB's night club. Also a rather conspicuous beneficiary of the mass gentrification in Lower Manhattan has been the Bowery Poetry Club run by poetry-profiteer Bob Holman who, along with his Green Party publicity stuntman Sander Hicks ("Vox Pop"), is one of the voices of cover charge socialism in New York.

The tenants "movement" in NYC is in big trouble since it in fact remains hostage to operators like the aforementioned McKee, who is largely responsible for the Rent Guidelines Board giveaways to the landlords in the first place. An effort started over one year ago to generate a true New York-wide tenants organization called the Union of New York Tenants (UNYTE)
remains on life support because of internal divisions not to speak of McKee-generated infil- trations. Unfortunately one of the more effective and key UNYTE organizers, Monte Schapiro, a tenant in a building on East 5th Street owned by the profiteering Ben Shaoul, has apparently been struck silent as regards UNYTE.

The existing euphemism known as rent stabilization is a loophole-riddled safety net of sorts. It is better than nothing. Indeed, if the laissez faire "libertarians" had their way and removed statutory rent protections entirely, one would have to house the homeless in stadiums, perhaps in the manner employed by Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, who kept political dissidents in a soccer stadium in Santiago.

The fact remains however that under rent stabilization the landlords are getting away with economic murder. At the Rent Guidlines Board the landlords predictably make rent increase demands so exhorbitant they know they won't get, fully aware that they will be allowed to pick tenant pockets incrementally anyway. My former landlord, the very politically connected (Ed Koch, et. al.) Thomas Berger (founder of the loftlord lobbying group called the Association of Commercial Property Owners), cooked his books at for example 190-A Duane Street in Tribeca (where I Iived as a loft tenant for 16 years) so effectively he should have been a chef.
Cooking the books and concealing profits is a way of life in the landlord-developer community. "Rent stabilization" lets them get away with it.

As readers of UP FRONT News are aware, on multiple occasion late in the 20th century two state legislators State Senator John Flynn (R.-Yonkers) and Assemblyman John Dearie (D.- Bx.) introduced the Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act. Flynn-Dearie would have required any landlord or landlady seeking a rent increase for any reason to prove need by opening his or her books for auditing by the state. Flynn-Dearie was backed by a number of tenants organizations, most importantly the large New York Metropolitan Council on Housing, led in those days by leftists such as Esther Rand and Jane Benedict.

Since Flynn-Dearie was co-sponsored by a veteran Republican, the tenant-sensitive John Flynn, it could have passed and become law. Among the people who killed Flynn-Dearie was the nefarious right wing (Manhattan Institute?) plant Mike McKee. McKee lined up with the landlord lobby and denounced the "open the books" provision as "too cumbersome." Flynn-Dearie as a result died multiple deaths in Albany. McKee then went on to do what he always does and denounced Republicans.

In fact, I did my best to save Flynn-Dearie by, among other travels, visiting my past hometown of Binghamton and leaving some mail at the Riverside Drive (that's Binghamton, not Manhattan) home of then Republican State Senate Majority Leader Warren Anderson, with whom I exchanged correspondence in Albany. Indeed my efforts were the subject of a story in the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin (by Mike Gormley, later with the Albany-Times Union and now at the Albany bureau of the Associated Press). Sen. Anderson was no tenants rights advocate but it was McKee and his landlord-connected "liberal" Democrats who killed Flynn-Dearie and who have given us the Swiss Cheese law called rent stabilization, which even allows for "owner occupancy" evictions, as the beleaguered tenants of 47 East 3rd Street in Manhattan have found out.

Christine Quinn and Mike McKee, consistently avoiding the key question of opening the landlord books, yammer about the fact that, as far as rent protection legislation is concerned, the laws are made in Albany and we don't have "home rule." That begs the issue. In fact, I am not at all certain that placing rent protection legislation under the control of a slush fund-baptized City Council very much under Quinnberg control, would constitute an improvement.

Christine Quinn gets tons of campaign cash from the developer lobby. If she were to endorse the "open the books" principle central to Flynn-Dearie, that cash flow would dry up. Quinn wants to be the mayor of New York City, which, from a tenants rights perspective, would be an unmitigated disaster. The only beneficiaries would be the developers and fifth columnists like McKee, who would probably get a very well-paid job in a Queen Quinn Administration.

At this point, while Christine Quinn's chances of getting my vote are about as good as John McCain's, I am not certain whom I will endorse.

I am, however, glad the the anti-gentrification, pro-tenant and pro-Free Tibet City Councilman Tony Avella is running for mayor.
* * * * * * *

THE TENANTS MOVEMENT AND THE ENEMY WTHIN.MIKE (“THE KNIFE”) MCKEE AND CHUCK DELANEY

UP FRONT News December, 24, 2005
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham

“The paper that can’t be bought and can’t be sold.”

http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/
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I first met Mike McKee in the late 1970’s or early 80’s on a train going up to Albany, with a group from the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants, (LMLT), that group led by Chuck Delaney. I was a loft tenant on the 5th floor of 190-A Duane Street, in Tribeca, under siege by my landlord, Thomas Berger, who, although he does not, to public knowledge, dabble in slums, belongs on everyone’s “worst landlords” list. I was active in the effort to get the politicians to enact rent protection legislation to stop the displacement of residential loft tenants. I had recently learned that Mr. Berger, of Forest Hills, Queens, who, over a period of several years, used every possible means, including major violence, and including no heat or any water for 5 ½ years, to displace me, was the founder and president of the Association of Commercial Property Owners, (ACPO), the loftlord wing of the real estate industry. He and his real estate lobbyist friend Lester Schulklapper, were very active on the other side in Albany and at City hall. Berger was – and presumably still is – at least a personal acquaintance of Ed Koch, who became one of the kings of budget cuts and of gentrification.

I managed to get onto the LMLT Steering Committee. My tenure there did not last long. It soon became apparent that, in particular, the unearthly-looking Delaney was using radical anti-landlord rhetoric to in fact delay and weaken protections for tenants. He did so by, while stifling dissent at LMLT meetings, refusing to speak with Republican legislators, a suicidal tactic since the Republican controlled the New York State Senate, whose approval by majority vote, was needed to pass any loft tenant protection legislation. Delaney, depended on professional leftists such as Councilmember Miriam Friedlander (whose response to dissent in her office was to throw the constituent out) and real-estate-beholden-but-tenants-rights-rapping legislators like State Senator Manfred Ohrenstein, who, together as Democrats, did not even have the power in Albany to pass a law in favor of virtue, let alone to legislation to protect working class, limited income artists and writers living in lofts from displacement.

So Delaney was very unhappy when, while he was railing against the Republicans but refusing to talk with them, I went to the Republican State Senate Majority Warren Anderson of Binghamton, a town I know well, and his downstate colleague from Staten Island, John Marchi, the two most powerful guys in the State Senate. Those visits, along with a somewhat confrontational letter I wrote to Mayor Koch, which yielded a grudging letter from him to me confirming in writing his support for loft tenants rights legislation in Albany, helped to revive a bill that was dying. I reminded the Republicans that it would hardly make New York City and State look good if some of our best and hardest working artists were out protesting all over the place because of imminent homelessness. The Republicans evidently agreed and stopped opposing rent protections for loft tenants.

Delaney’s next move came when, while I was in Albany on my own, I learned from the lawyer who supervised the drafting of the bill in the State Assembly, that a major legal problem had emerged and the bill could not move ahead and has to be redrafted. I im- mediatelty so informed Delaney, who, aided and abetted by Friedland, et. al., continued to support the stillborn bill, creating a one year delay in the enactment of loft tenant pro- tection legislation. Lots of people, with no protection against rent gougers, who proliferated in places like Soho, Noho, Tribeca, and what is now DUMBO, were evicted during that year.

Through all of this, Delaney, collaborating closely with Mike McKee and McKee’s New York State Tenants & Neighborhood Coalition (which Delaney, without consulting the LMLT membership, associated to loft organization to) propagandized ad nauseum for an “artist” named Mario Pikus who was being persistently threatened with eviction from his loft on Walker Street by his loftlord, Thomas Berger colleague-in-greed Eli Lipkis. Delaney and the succession of slippery lawyers who represented the marginally artistically talented Pikus over the years, took his case to the Court of Appeals, New York State’s highest court, on the totally backward strategy that a rent strike is justified if the owner has not gotten a “C of O”, a residential Certificate of Occupancy. Except that, in many cases, owners could not get certificates because of substantial code violations in spaces that, in many cases, had been rendered habitable, if not legal, by the tenants. Not even the most altruistic landlord is going to play economic Russian Roulette by investing into code compliance repairs if he cannot get even a reasonable rent. Sure enough, Pikus lost in the courts and, in something of a boost to the NYC art world, moved to Los Angeles.

Delaney, who, when he learned of a knife-wielding attack upon me by two of Thomas Berger’s “contractors” on the roof of 190A Duane Street, expressed open support for the landlord, with Mike McKee, also made a false complaint against me, via an always-on-edge state legislative aide who was on so much psychiatric medication that she was, at times, marginally functional, which resulted in my being arrested in the Legislative Office Building in Albany. That took place on the day of the final vote for a Loft Bill which, thanks to Delaney and Mike McKee, contained a cost pass-along loophole that would allow for rent “stabilization” in the qualifying lofts flexible enough to permit blatant rent gouging, of which people like Thomas Berger were expert practitioners.

It is, however, when it comes to the history of the most urgently still needed, even in resurrected form, Flynn-Dearie Rent Protection Act that Mike McKee’s true anti-tenant loyalties became very, very clear. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, when, in particular under Ed Koch, gentrification was causing homelessness, State Senator John Flynn (R.-Yonkers) and Assemblyman John Dearie (D.-Bx.) recurrently introduced a bill which, if enacted, would have required any landlord of a multiple dwelling who wished to raise the rent for any reason to open his or her books to state inspectors in order to determine if an increase was justified. The notion of the real estate industry opening its books is the equivalent of asking Dick Cheney to videotape for public consumption his meetings with oil and military executives. The real estate industry said, “No way!” And so did Mike McKee! Interestingly, McKee and his real estate allies used the same argument, i.e. that requiring landlords to open their books would be “too cumbersome.” McKee’s New York State Tenants & Neighborhood Coalition split the tenant movement, then headed by the Flynn-Dearie- supporting New York Metropolitan Council on Housing, and Flynn-Dearie went down, time after time. And, had it not been for McKee, it is conceivable, because John Flynn was a conservative Republican, with good upstate ties, that Flynn Dearie could have become law, especially since the governor, Hugh Carey, was a New York City Democrat. The multiple deaths of Flynn-Dearie “open the books” protections have left millions of tenants under the dubious protections of rent “stabilization.” It has enabled countless landlords to rent gouge and otherwise harass tenants and to create homelessness. Indeed, New York has the embarrassing distinction of being a city where you can be paying $1,900/mo. for a small rent “stabilized” apartment.

And thanks to Chuck Delaney, (a photographer who, last I heard, still lives at a miraculously reasonable rent in a small loft building on Pearl Street near Ground Zero, , which was the site of the highly publicized murder of another tenant, with, while the landlord has been a person of interest, no perpetrator yet found), rents in the lofts are in the stratosphere of gentrification.

Mike McKee is still seen at affordable housing meetings and is still at times paraded about as a tenants rights “spokesperson.” My suggestion is that Mike McKee, a reported spawning of a right wing think tank known as The Manhattan Institute, look for another assignment. How about “The Apprentice?”
* * * * * * *
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THE PROGRESSIVE CASE AGAINST RALPH NADER (AND CYNTHIA McKINNEY) CONSORTING WITH FULANI/LaROUCHE "GREEN" NEO-FASCISTS.

UP FRONT News July 5, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
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By Tom Weiss

In 2000 and briefly in 2004, because of my dissatisfaction with Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry, for a time I supported Ralph Nader. Indeed his campaign people should recall my efforts, in coordination with his campaign manager, at getting him some attention during the 2000 baseball playoffs. Because of some contacts I had in the Bronx with some New York Yankee staffers, as UP FRONT News Editorial Advisor and Yankee Stadium neighborhood Bronxite Willard Whittingham can verify, I explored the possibility of the baseball-savvy Nader attending a playoff or World Series game at Yankee Stadium and perhaps commenting on the state of the game on national television.

The Yankees were interested and so was Major League baseball, which has its headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Ultimately, although the idea got explicit encouragement from Nader's campaign director, the whole thing went under because of the academic corporate types (David Peel would label them "yuppies") who ran the rather elitist Green Party campaign operation out of Washington D.C. (in an office physically separate from Nader campaign HQ) didn't like me and didn't like my idea.

My idea to get Nader to the World Series (in the only New York Yankee/New York Met "Subway Series" in history), would probably have generated possibly large numbers of votes for Mr. Nader. Why? A national interview, with a politically knowledgeable sportscaster such as Tim McCarver, would have given Nader the opportunity to really connect with America (something that was and is beyond the capacity of the thoroughly gentrified and, much worse, neo-fascist-infiltrated Green Party). Nader grew up in Winsted, Conn., played baseball, and, in his presumably pre-anti-corporation years, was a Yankee fan. He occasionally commuted to games at Yankee Stadium. I would have used my media contacts to encourage perhaps McCarver to ask Nader about the corporatization of baseball.

After I got a go-ahead from the Yankees (for a seat at least for an American League Playoff Game at the Stadium) and from Major League baseball, which handles special seating for the World Series, I tried to work out the details with the Nader people. (Somewhere in my archives I have some fax exchanges.) The Greens however preferred to have Nader campaign in large amphitheatre rallies - a bad strategy because celebrity (Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon at the time)-sprinkled mega-rallies for big fundraising bucks do not translate into votes.

I took a trip to the two Nader campaign offices in Washington and got a handwritten note from a big shot Green stating that they were not interested in having Nader attend the World Series. That decision helped their candidate win the the paltry but critical 3% vote which gave the election to Cheney/Bush and forever diminished Nader's political credibility.

I did manage, with a journalist friend of mine, to get into one of the playoff games for free.

The Greens also reacted very negatively to my efforts at bringing Nader together with disaf- fected Democrat Rev. Al Sharpton, although Sharpton did come up with a "too little, too late" endorsement of Nader at the National Action Network HQ. I remember that rally well, as, joining Nader and Al Sharpton on the dais, were Dr. Cornel West and Patti Smith.

During the Q&A, I asked Nader about Tibet and he responded with a denunciation of Com-munist China as Rev. Sharpton nodded in agreement. (As far as I am aware, Sharpton has since remained silent on the racist Genocide in Tibet.)

The most interesting exchange occurred when erstwhile Sharpton ally Lenora Fulani (careful certainly not to even hint at her ideological solidarity with the mega-fascist Lyndon H. La-Rouche, Jr.) asked Mr. Nader if they could work together in a "coalition." (In fact the term "coalition" when used by a crypto-fascist such as Fulani, means "occupation.") Mr. Nader, after offering a very perfunctory acknowledgement of Ms. Fulani's record as an African-American activist, said to her, "no deals."

Since that time, however, Ralph Nader has emerged as in fact a "left" stalking horse for Fulani's political godfather, the aging but still very active and dangerous LaRouche. (For more on the history of the de facto megalomaniac, very politically connected domestic fascist and convicted felon LaRouche visit the websites of in particular investigative reporter Dennis King and read UP FRONT News. Mr. King, whom I have met, regards LaRouche as "the most dangerous man in America" and I agree.)

LaRouche, who presents himself publicly as an advocate of the presidencies of FDR, is notorious for his dramatic ideological shifts from the ultra-left (e.g. Maoists, Trotskyites) to the far out and racist right (e.g. the KKK). In recent years LaRouche, as always using well camouflaged "left"-spouting surrogates, e.g. Fulani, has been busily fifth-columning his way into liberal and left groups, most particularly the Greens but also "World Can't Wait", the International Action Center and the St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church-based "9/11 Truth" group, et. al.

The infiltration became readilly apparent most obviously duriung the 2004 Nader for Presi-dent campaign which, particuarly in pivotal New York, depended heavily on "meetups." The New York meetup was run as a total dicatorship by a Fulaniite Green named Cathy Sadell. Her love partner George Tatevosyan when needed provided the neo-fascist lies and muscle. Tatevosyan once physically assaulted me to prevent my attending an April, 2004 Nader press conference in Manhattan to which the candidate had invited me. Involved as a co-conspirator was Tatevosyan's Green Party pal and evident close Nader associate Gerald ("Jerry") Kann. The incident was witnessed by activists Roman Shusterman and Richie Degen. Kann is a violent crypto-fascist who on two occasions tried to hoodwink the good citizens of the Astoria/Long Island City communities of Queens into electing him to the New York City Council. The first time around, running against an uninspired Democrat, where Republicans are not a factor, Kann got a reported 20% of the vote. The second time around, after the neighborhood got its first distribution of UP FRONT News about Jerry ("Can't") Kann, his totals dropped dramatically.

Among Gerald Kann's political associates is veteran Green Party wacko Paul ("Zool") Zul- kowitz. Fulaniite Zulkowitz, who along with Fulani, orchestrated the assault on me, made certain that things would go smoothly in the autocratically run Nader meetups. Zulkowitz, an infiltrationist fixture in the peace movement, particularly with the extraordinarily politically gullible Cindy Sheehan, has openly boasted about his close personal relationships with "Ralph and Patti." "Ralph has been like a father to me!", he once prated at a Nader event in front of Patti Smith and a few hundred other people at Ethical Culture, where I later "outed" Kann as a crypro-fascist right in front of the nervously grinning Nader. (As far as I am aware, Mr. Nader and Ms. Smith, who, to her possible discomfort, has received UP FRONT News directly from me face-to-face and via the internet), remain friends. Ms. Smith, however, is fully aware that Ralph Nader consorts with neo-fascists.)

Zulkowitz received a long overdue mountain of negative coverage in UP FRONT News for his cynical political game in 2005 known as "Camp Casey" (the name being parasited from Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq) in Union Square. Camp Casey became little more than a propaganda outpost for LaRouche-ites and various extremists including some people who think that Hamas and Hezbollah have the correct attitude towards Israel. Zulkowitz put a recurrently violent and often inebriated street guy who called himself "Totay" in charge of Camp Casey.

Totay converted Camp Casey into a de facto shelter for himself and his girlfriend, regularly helping himself to the donation jar.

The whole thing wound up in a near riot on September 19, 2005 when Zulkowitz had Ms. Sheehan there as a guest speaker. Zulkowitz, however, willfully withheld from Ms. Sheehan and everyone else the fact that he had not obtained the required police permit and thereby staged his own arrest at the rally. Zulkowitz' "forget the sound device permit" tactic was the contribution of none other than another ally, Geoffrey Blank, the self-appointed "president" of the No Police State Coalition, a leaderless free speech group that had been holding Union Square speakouts In Union Square. Blank in fact, spouting "free speech", had used threats and violence (mostly, a la Tatevosyan/Kann, against me) to try to hijack the NPSC speakouts regularly, doing quite convincing impersonations of at least two of his role models, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Geofffey Blank emerged as one of the very few (at least nominally) Jewish jihadists around.

I don't know to what degreee Zulkowitz' position in the Greens has plummeted in the wake of the UP FRONT News exposes or following Zulkowitz' response to my stories, a response that became an UP FRONT News story in itself and shows that this Nader pal, like a number of others, is a violent psychopath. Zulkowitz let it be known that my UP FRONT News criticisms of him and Blank were so hurtful that he had decided to commit suicide by jumping off a certain bridge in Nassau County. To make a long story shorter, the police soon showed up at his door and gave him a choice between incarceration and involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility. In an apparent moment of lucidity, "Zool" chose the hospital.

It was on the day that he was reportedly discharged that a mutual acquaintance told me that Paul Zulkowitz had told him that he was going to shoot me with his Magnum 357. At the time I was at a peace rally near what used to be the Plaza Hotel at the time and I went straight to the cops, just like I have done every time fascists such as Geoffrey Blank have criminally harassed me. (Blank has not yet to my knowledge been questioned about his involvement in an April 7, 2005 major physical assault on me by an acquaintance of his named Wan Yun.)

All of these people are connected to the local racist Lenora Fulani and her mentor "Dr." Fred Newman. Their ideological godfather is LaRouche. (Read Dennis King.)

Last November 28 I saw Jerry Kann at a Baruch College speech by presidential candidate former Democratic U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney. After I politely exposed him at the event, he made a fool out of himself during the Q&A by asking Ms. McKinney about assuring fairness at the Green Party nominating convention. It appears that Nader and many
Greens are parting ways. Ms. McKinney replied by suggesting that fairness was up to the Greens.

Union Square speakout activist Eric Rassi attended a recent Nader event in a modest-sized room at establishment left-friendly Cooper Union - the establishment left doing its part to keep Cooper Union solvent. Introducing Nader at the event was Gerald Kann.

In January, 2007 at a Nader booksigning event at the Union Square Barnes & Noble (two of Nader's Brownshirts, Tatevosyan and his beloved Sadell, were present as was Kann), I tried to ask Nader about any continuing ties to Fulani/LaRouche. Nader's face darkened, he grumbled to me "So you're still on that [Fulani/LaRouche]", and stalked off.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who knowingly consorts with fascists is unqualified for the presidency.

Internet information shows that Jerry Kann is a Green Party official based in Queens.

Cynthia McKinney has reportedly left the Democratic Party and joined the Greens. She has apparrently decided, following some friendly face-to-face exchanges between us, not to answer any of my e-mails.

The Green Party in New York is not a democracy. Aside from people like the violent George Tatevosyan, Paul Zulkowitz and Kann, the New York Greens are run by Howie Hawkins of Syracuse. I recall one conversation in particular some years ago with an on-her-way-out-of- the-Green-Party lady from Queens. She spoke about Hawkins, whom she described as a "Stalinist." I've experienced Hawkins up close. He is a regular speaker at those cover charge establishment left events at Cooper Union. One time when, during the Q&A at a plenary, I spontaneously asked him a question about ties to Fulani/LaRouche with a stare that makes Cheney's malevolent gaze appear gentle by comparison.

Hawkins was one of the "split-the-left" mouthpieces that the Greens and LaRouche-ites put up against me (not against Hillary Clinton) when I ran against her for the U.S. Senate as a Democratic write-in candidate in 2006. And, like Hillary Cliton and LaRouche-ite Democratic Party "candidate" Jonathan Tasini, Hawkins refused to debate me.

Cynthia McKinney is an African-American, who, during out perhaps ten minute conversation before her speech, urged me to ask her about the almost lily-white makeup of the Green Party. During the Q&A, in response to my question, she urged the Greens to do something about that.

I well recall the Republcan National Convention in 2000 when that almost lily-white political party placed a number of blacks and hispanics in prominent dais positions.

Green Party infiltrators like Fulani have a history of collaborating with Republicans. Fulani, then dictator of the Independence Party of New York, in 2001 gave Republican mayoral candidate Michael Bloomberg the IPNY ballot line, thereby enabling him to win a very close election. She did it again in 2005. Bloomberg has since rewarded her and Fred Newman with tax breaks for their front organizations, the All Stars Project (Fulani) and the Castillo Center (for the Arts) run by Newman, who in his spare time, operates the sex-with-your-therapist "social therapy" cult.

Maybe the Green Party convention will ethnically emulate the image-conscious Republican Party.

In joining the Greens, a political party that has de facto criminal crypto-fascists among its members and in seeking that party's nomination, Cynthia McKinney has rendered herself unqualfied to be president.

Fight greed and fascism in America. Vote for Tom Weiss as a write-in candidate for president.
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THE PROGRESSIVE CASE AGAINST BARACK OBAMA. (CHUMP) "CHANGE" FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

UP FRONT News July 1, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
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http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

Since I plan to run for president on a human rights priority platform as a Democratic write-in candidate, I am putting forth the progressive case against each of the announced candidates. Today's focus is on Barack Obama. In the coming days and weeks, I will present the cases against John McCain (quite obvious), the Lyndon LaRouche-linked Ralph Nader, the Green Party's Cynthia McKinney and the Libertarians' Bob Barr (also quite obvious).

As readers of UP FRONT News are aware, I supported Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. I don't think it is necessary for me to again go into much detail as to my opposition to Mrs. Clinton. Indeed, as thousands of people, in New York and beyond, are aware, I ran against the Republicrat Clinton for the U.S. Senate because I regard her as essentially a Machiavellian politician whose recurrentlly "liberal" and populist rhetoric is nothing more than camouflage for her essentially aristocratic, anti-poor, militaristic and corporate loyalties. Mrs. Clinton's record is one of hostility to human rights.
For more on my Senate campaign visit www.tomweissdemocratforussenate.blogspot.com.

Mrs. Clinton, who along with her recurrently wandering husband, makes tons of money in the so-called "Communist" China, a nation ruled by a series of regimes which practice genocide as a matter of domestic and international policy. The clearest example of that is the continuing Genocide in Tibet. Both Clintons have known for years the details of the genocide. They got the information from me via Bill Clinton's secretary Betty M. Currie; I have her fax to me. They buried it and - tried to bury me by having me thrown in jail in Washington and by harassing me in multiple ways since.

Mrs. Clinton is closely allied to the worst of the corporate predators, such as the titans of the New York real estate developer lobby. Like her local delegates, such as NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, before certain audiences she can be counted on to spout tenants rights and civil rights. Mrs. Clinton is legendary for parachuting into black churches and spourting Malcolm X-style oratory. She then returns to Chappaqua, N.Y., an elitist community that I am told by a resident who lives there because the schools are good, is lily-white by design.

Mrs. Clinton is also one of the most vengeful people in politics. Indeed, despite the racial contrast, she has something of Robert Mugabe in her. On at least two occasions, because of my activities in exposing her and her husband's direct involvement in the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet, she has made explicit threats against me, aside from refusing me urgently needed constituent services some years ago when I was homeless. One of threats was made to me by telephone via her investigator "Mr. Zimmerman." The other threat, even more explicit, came in the form of a defamatory September 5, 2003 e-mail to my brother Jim in Marathon, N.Y. signed by her staffer Yajaira Yepez. Jim, who is evidently more easily intimidated than I am, has refused to disclose the full nature of his communications with Hillary Clinton. I have also been criminally harassed by some of Hillary Clinton's political allies including my State Senator Diane Savino and the quite seriously paranoid and CIA-linked NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum (with whom, via a family member of mine, I've been personally acquainted since 1979).

It was apparent that Barack Obama's candidacy was based on his recognition of widespread dissatisfaction with the arrogant and imperious Hillary Clinton, who had thought, with media encouragement, that the Democratic Party nomination was hers for the taking. Obama spoke eloquently about the politics of participation, while, no matter what she might say, Mrs. Clinton represented the politics of the insider.

Things began to change for me via a vis Barack Obama on June 26, 2007 when I attended a campaign event at the Our Children's Foundation at 527 West 125th Street in Harlem. The featured speaker was Michelle Obama. After the speeches and media crush were over, I went over to Mrs. Obama and, as State Senator Bill Perkins stood next to me, I spent perhaps three minutes telling Mrs. Obama about Tibet. Mrs. Obama listened carefully but said little. I emphasized the fact that the Genocide in Tibet is racist in nature as it involves the oppression of the ethnically and culturally distinct dark-complexioned Tibetans by the light-complexioned Chinese.

I made reference to specific types of tortures but avoided any gruesome descriptions. I of course told her that I was a Democratic write-in candidate against Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Obama accepted several UP FRONT News articles on Tibet and some of my campaign literature and assured me that she would give the material directly to her husband.

During the following weeks and months I made a number of calls and sent several e-mails to various high level Obama campaign people, including Campaign Director David Plouffe and Jordan Thomas, a well-known actor who played a major role in the very potent Obama organizing drive, particularly in Brooklyn. I had met Mr. Thomas several times at the very well attended Brooklyn meetups and some high visibility Obama events, such as his speeches in Washington Square and at the Apollo, both of which I attended as a member of the media.

None of my post-Michelle Obama meeting communications, all sent to very direct personal e-mail addresses, have received a response.

As I have made clear to everyone, I will not support any candidate who refuses to speak out on the Genocide in Tibet and on the very related matter of opposition to the Beijing Olympics.

Barack Obama is of course to be congratulated for, at least for the time being, saving the U.S. and the world from a Marie Antoinette-like Hillary Clinton presidency.

And that's where the congratulation stops.

Since Mrs. Clinton, after running a lie-riddled rather racist campaign, belatedly threw in the towel, Obama has been falling all over himself to fall all over her. He seems to forget that a central part of her campaign against him was her claim that he is too "inexperienced" to be president. All of a sudden, within a space of a few days, Obama has obtained the requisite "experience?" Obama is apparently now ready to climb into a political bed with a politician whose lies are so blatant that they are refutable as far as away as Bosnia. And, considering the reality that Bill Clinton is at least sometimes around, that sets up a political menage a trois scenario that should keep the Republicans and talk show hosts very happy.

As the "sniper fire" incident proved once again, Hillary Clinton is a liar. As I've suggested, Mrs. Clinton is more of a cowardly sniper than she is a target of sniper fire.

Now that Obama is toadying up to the Republicrat Clinton, he is of course moving to the right (an ideological place defined as the "center" by the Clintons). And so he picks former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin as an economic advisor. It was people like Rubin who were responsible for Bill Clinton's assault on the poor camouflaged as "welfare reform", which removed a safety net and, as a result, worsened the homelessness crisis in America. Obama's economic policy advisor is Jason Furman, who is described in The New York Times as regarding the notoriously anti-labor Wal-Mart corporation as a "good business model."

The Times' David Brooks points out that real estate professionals have given more campaign donations to Obama than to McCain. The same holds true of bankers and hedge fund managers. Perhaps that is what Barack Obama means when he talks about "change." At that rate the American people, under an Obama Administration, will be left with chump change.

Bill Clinton insulted the American public with the notion of his being the first "black president." A great many black people suffered under Bill Clinton.

It seems that Barack Obama wants to become the first "black Bill Clinton."
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FIGHT GENOCIDE AND FASCISM. SUPPORT HUMAN RIGHTS. IT'S WRITE-IN TIME AGAIN. I'M YOUR BEST CHOICE.

UP FRONT News June 30, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

ALL THE ANNOUNCED PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES, REGARDLESS OF IDEOLOGY
OR RHETORIC, SHARE SOMETHING IN COMMON. THEY KEEP POLITICAL SECRETS AND PLAY GAMES WITH THE TRUTH. FIGHT GENOCIDE AND FASCISM. SUPPORT HUMAN RIGHTS. IT'S WRITE-IN TIME AGAIN. I'M YOUR BEST CHOICE.

By Tom Weiss

As many thousands of people are aware, despite minimal coverage by the corporate controlled mainstream and "alternative" media, I ran for the U.S. Senate as a Democratic write-in candidate against Republicrat Hillary Clinton. The chances are that I will never find out how many people actually voted for me, thanks to the NYC and NYC election authorities. Indeed, I learned of several cases in which people were told they could not vote for a write-in candidate. In fact there had been all sorts of difficulties during my entire campaign particularly with ther NYC Board of Elections, which is run 100% by the Democratic and Republican Party machines.

Despite all that, I am absolutely serious in announcing here (even if for example the media mogul billionaire Donald Newhouse owned Staten Island Advance chooses to suppress the news, as it did for months when I ran against Mrs. Clinton), that I am urging all human rights sensitive voters to write my name in for president.

To be sure, I would not make such a decision without tangible support. In fact a number of non-machine political activists have suggested that I consider running for president as a write-in candidate. Among those urging me along those lines has been No Police State Coalition veteran and list-serve co-manager Roman Shusterman. At yesterday's Union Square speakout, musician activist David Peel of Lower East Side and John Lennon fame, spoke about his unhappiness with all announced presidential candidates.

At the post-speakout meeting I said that I was pretty much finished with the now sucking-
up-to-Hillary Barack Obama. I said and that both Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney are ethically compromised by ties to the LaRouche-ites in and around the Green Party. I repeated the obvious by stating that the militarist reactionary John McCain was out of the question. When I suggested that I was considering acting on Mr. Shusterman's urgings and running for president as a write-in candidate, David Peel announced his support and, with a fellow musician Layne Agee, began to work on a campaign song for me. Mr. Peel, who is known throughout the world (and has not let the fame go to his head), was the de facto musical director for my U.S. Senate campaign. His song, "Tom Weiss for Senator", did not go platinum but was performed at several events.

It is apparent that all the existing presidential candidates fall short when it comes to at least three over-riding issues - genocide, the advance of camouflaged domestic fascism (e.g. Lyndon LaRouche) and, on the bottom line, uncontrolled greed.

Certainly when it comes to greed, there is plenty to talk and write about. For sure the New York Yankees and the $30 million/year part-time worker Alexander Rodriguez will be a campaign issue every bit as New York Stock Exchange predator Richard Grasso will be. The same holds true for a perverted value system that for example holds up the actress Angelina Jolie as some kind of humanitarian role model because she is giving a few African kids much needed new leases on life as she "earns" perhaps $20 million for doing a movies that sexualize and glorify violence.

We are again (still?) in the age of the robber barons, most obscenely typified in New York in particular by the avaricious real estate developers who are largely responsible, along with their (s)elected representatives, for the housing crisis and therefore for homelessness. Donald Trump will be a campaign isse.

As far as I am concerned, while there is plenty of genocide around everywhere, including the U.S., which wages war on the poor and the dark-complexioned, perhaps the most entrenched genocide is that being perpetrated in occupied Tibet by Communist China. Barack Obama and John McCain have remained silent on this issue. And while I have had no contact with the McCain campaign, I've had plenty with the Obama campaign. As readers of UP FRONT News are aware, on June 26, 2007 I discussed the Tibet Genocide for several minutes with Michelle Obama when she and I met at a Harlem campaign event. Indeed, Obama campaign heavy State Senator Bill Perkins was standing right next to me and witnessed the entire conversation. He is fully aware that Mrs. Obama, upon accepting several copies of UP FRONT News as well as some of my Tom Weiss for U.S. Senate campaign literature, assured me that she would give my material directly to her husband.

Since then, none of my communications to various high-level Obama campaign officials has been answered. Among those who have not responded are campaign manager David Plouffe and Obama activist, the actor Jordan Thomas, who was a major factor in Mr. Obama's very well organized effort in New York.

I will not support any candidate who remains silent on the Genocide in Tibet. The silence, similar to the silence in the 1930's about the developing Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, is motivated by the love of money, as "Communist" China is perhpa the most populous profit- eering pool in history. The Clintons make a lot of money in China and, it appears that Obama has interests there also. (John Edwards, the recipient of what I call the $400 "Delilah" haircut, also chose to remain silent on the issue although, as former Edwards for President activist Steven Gradman can verify, Edwards got the necessary Tibet information from me.)

Since there is no chance that I will support a reactionary militarist like John McCain, I don't plan on pushing him on the Tibet issue, although if he speaks out, I'll report it in UP FRONT News.

Ralph Nader first spoke out on Tibet at my behest a few years ago. Nonetheless Nader, who is working closely with criminals such as the Green Party Lyndon LaRouche ideologue Gerald Kann, has shown himself to be ethically unqualified to be president. During the 2004 race Nader gladly took the support of the LaRouche-ite racist Lenora Fulani (who, this time around, seems to be distancing herself from Nader "the Nadir"). As Ralph Nader and friends of his such as poet/rocker Patti Smith are well aware, Kann (and his violent Green fascist associate George Tatevosyan) perpetrated a physical assault upon me in April, 2004 to prevent my attending a Nader news conference in Manhattan. The assault was witnessed by No Police State Coalition activists Roman Shusterman and Richie Degen. And when I asked Nader about his Fulani/LaRouche ties at his booksigning a few years ago at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, he became as tight-lipped as (Big Dick) Cheney.

And that leaves former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat turned Green from Georgia. Ms. McKinney has made some national headlines with her strong pro-Palestinian oratory. Indeed, some of her remarks were perceived as anti-Semitic by Zionist Jewish people. Indeed it was largely Jewish opposition that contributed to Ms. McKinney's defeat in a Democratic primary some years ago.

My views on the Palestinian/Israeli matter are very similar to those of my Palestinian-Amer-ican friend Wael Sharaydeh, formerly of Staten Island and now living in Cincinnati. He opposes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank. He also opposes the violent rejectionism of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. He has no sympathy for suicide bomberts. Mr. Sharaydeh has written a paper, which I have edited, calling for the creation of a secular state to include what is now Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. All citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion, are to have equal rights and a freely elected government would have the responsibility of resolving the "right to return" question affecting displaced Palestinian refugees.

Ms. McKinney also drew some attention when she became the first member of the U.S.
Congress to seriously question the official story as regards 9/11, suggesting that U.S. government officials had foreknowledge of the attacks, i.e. that 9/11 was "an inside job."

Indeed, the second time I met Ms. McKinney directly was several years ago when she presided over a public hearing held at Symphony Space in Manhattan. It was there that I heard people like the researcher Michael Ruppert, the author of "Crossing the Rubicon", a book about the politics of oil that includes data that suggest strongly that Dick Cheney had foreknowledge. As far as I am aware no one has rebutted Ruppert's suggestion regarding reportedly Cheney-authorized simulated airliner hijackings over the northeast U.S. early on the morning of September 11, 2001. The thinking goes that the simulated hijackings generated the radar confusion that enabled the actually hijacked planes to get to their destinations, in particular the World Trade Center.

And as far as I am concerned, Dick Cheney is the closest thing in American history to a soulless fascist to be a (reportedly defective) heartbeat away from the presidency. Anything
is possible with Dick Cheney.

Cynthia McKinney, unfortunately, however, has become one of the darlings of the totally fraudulent "9/11 Truth" group based at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church in Manhattan undemocratically led by two LaRouche surrogates named Les Jamieson and Frank Mo-rales with strong Green Party connections. These two autocratic characters (often spouting about the virtues of "free speech") have seen fit to bring veteran LaRouche-ites such as the Schiller Institute's Webster Tarpley in as 9/11 "experts." When I began asking questions about the fifth column-style LaRouche infiltration, Jamieson and Morales responded with harassments and threats. When a young "9/11 Truth" participant named Dan Wallace, who witnessed the harassments against me, did a video-interview with me, and complained to me about having been harassed by LaRouche people, he soon wound up dead of unnnatural causes at his home in Queens. The official report is "drug overdose" and no one in "9/11 Truth" is talking. "9/11 Truth" in the persons of the shifty Jamieson and Morales, is also accused by a now rival conspiracy-oriented group of embezzlement.

A common thread here, as it is in the Nader campaign, is the insidious LaRouche factor and more locally the hopefully politically obsolete spectre of the Queens-based psychopath and crypto-fascist Geoffrey Blank. It was Blank (the guest speaker at a December 4, 2005 "9/11 Truth" event at St. Mark's that nearly burst into violence against me as Blank brought along some of his brownshirts like "squatter" wacko Karl Rosenstein, a guy who has tried to assault me on several occasions), for several months the self-appointed dictator of Union Square, who responded to my decision, backed by the No Police State Coalition, to run for the Senate and against Mrs. Clinton with threats and serious violence.

The threats against me have come from a range of pseudo-"left" activists. When a La-Rouche-oriented character named Jonathan Tasini decided to run for the U.S. Senate (against me, not against Mrs. Clinton, as he claimed), his people, such as the directly La-Rouche-connected Charles Lenchner (of the Progressive Democrats for America), tried to have me arrested at campaign events. Also involved in such threats was a fraud out of the Howard Dean for President circus named Tracy Denton from Dean's Democracy for New York City. Denton threatened to have me arrested at the June, 2006 DFNYC Senate endorsement meeting. Ms. Denton is a fixture in most "liberal" Democratic campaigns, e.g. Norman Siegel's runs for NYC Public Advocate. As I have told Mr. Siegel, having Tracy Denton in one's campaign is a sure road to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. My guess is that Denton would respond to any questions as to ties with the convicted felon LaRouche (a Democrat) with silence, sort of like Geoffrey Blank.

When Cynthia McKinney came to New York to give a speech about her presidentail candidacy at Baruch College last November 28, I attended. Before her speech, at the reception I had the chance to talk directly with Ms. McKinney for about ten minutes. She smiled warmly when I reminded her that we had first met some years ago when she was still a congressperson and she attended a human rights awards ceremony at St. John's Cathedral in Manhattan. At the time she was standing a few feet from the Dalai Lama of Tibet, an award recipient.

I told Ms. McKinney my views on Tibet (I am in favor of independence for Tibet and I am opposed to the Beijing Olympics). She told me that she is in favor of "self-determination" for Tibet. And so on that issue she is well ahead of Obama, McCain and probably Nader, who has been critical of China, but, at least as far as I am aware, has not called for Tibetan inde- pendence.

I spoke for several minutes about my deep concerns regarding the clear infiltration into the Greens by LaRouche-ite fascists like Gerald Kann (who was at the McKinney event) and Fulani. Indeed, when I expressed my view that, considering the ethnic makeup of the Green Party, it should be re-named the White Party, she smiled and suggested that I ask her about that during the post-speech Q&A. I did and she replied that the racial matter was of concern to her. She did acknowledge being acquainted with Kann and having discussed her candidacy with Lenora Fulani. She seemed to have little awareness of Fulani's anti-Jewish outbursts and Fulani's collaboration with people like Michael Bloomberg, who would not have been elected mayor in 2001 had it not been for Fulani's giving him the Independence Party ballot line in 2001. Bloomberg later arranged for her front organization "The All-Stars Project" and her political partner, the "social therapy" cult leader and Jewish racist Fred Newman and his Castillo Center, to get tax breaks in exchange.

Since our November meeting I've sent Ms. McKinney several e-mails, including one with a very complimentary UP FRONT News article about her candidacy. No reply. Some weeks ago I called her friend Dr. Donald H. Smith, one of the organizers of the Baruch College event. After a friendly e-mail exchange between Dr. Smith and me, he contacted Ms. McKinney in my behalf. She replied, apologizing for not having sent me any e-mails and asking me to submit some questions to her for reply. My May 21, 2008 e-mail, sent to Ms. McKinney directly and c.c.'d to Dr. Smith, which asks for her views on the Beijing Olympics, which contains as an attachment my earlier e-mail to Dr. Smith about the LaRouche-ite mess that is the Green Party (at least in New York), has, despite some followups, has yielded only silence.

It is my understanding that, perhaps to outflank non-Green Party member Nader, Ms. Mc-Kinney has joined the Green Party. Mistake!

It appears that, despite Cynthia McKinney's consistently populist and progressive rhetoric, she is unwilling to separate herself from the "left" spouting neo-fascists all around her. She is not qualified to be president.

As I've suggested several times at Union Square speakouts and elsewhere, there is one characteristic that all the other presidential candidates share, regardess of ideology. That characteristic is keeping political secrets (e.g. ties to LaRouche) and, in varying degrees, an unwillingness to speak the truth. I say "varying" because, when it comes to outright lying, Hillary Clinton gets the gold medal. If someone were to ask Mrs. Clinton if she had ever made any threats against me, assuming she would take the question, she would have to deny it. And since she has made two threats against me - one in the form of a defamatory e-mail about me from a high-level Clinton staffer to my apparently easily intimated younger brother Jim in upstate New York - she would be lying. Mrs. Clinton is more of a cowardly political sniper than, as she has claimed, a target of "sniper fire" in Bosnia. And now that Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama appear to be jumping into at what is at least a queen-sized political bed together, he is subject to an worsening of that highly contagious politically transmitted disease.

And as I said, John McCain and Ralph Nader, regardless of the contrasts in their respective rhetorics, are unqualified.

Vote for me.
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"THE STATEN ISLAND STALKER" GARY ("ENOUGH") PHANEUF INTERRUPTS BILL MOYERS (AND ME) AT BARNES & NOBLE.

UP FRONT News July 7, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

"THE STATEN ISLAND STALKER" GARY ("ENOUGH") PHANEUF INTERRUPTS BILL MOYERS (AND ME) AT BARNES & NOBLE. A LAROUCHE-ITE GEOFFREY BLANKIE AND LAROUCHE-ITE STORY NOT COVERED BY THE STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE.

By Tom Weiss

The political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche, who has spent much of his adult life as a racist and megalomaniacal cult leader collaborating with both the radical left (e.g. Maoists) and the right (e.g. the KKK) is known for having his followers create incidents at events featuring politically promi-nent people. LaRouche-ites often hurl obscenities - and sometime physical objects - at in particular Henry Kissinger. That kind of behavior does little other than to perhaps get a LaRouche cultist arrested and help Kissinger to appear as a crime victim, rather than a political crime perpetrator.

One venue where practitioners of LaRouche tactics exhibit themselves is at Barnes & Noble booksignings. It is also useful to note that at least some of the wackos who have generated such scenes at the Union Square Barnes & Noble are at least acqaintances of the totally discredited LaRouche ideologue, Geoffrey Blank, the now deposed former self-appointed dictator of the Union Square speakouts.

At a B&N booksigning months ago featuring Clinton Democratic heavies James Carville and Paul Begala, (erstwhile?) Blankie Ben ("The Lesser") Maurer, at a presumably appointed moment, jumped out of his seat in the full house audience and shouted "war criminal" and related insults as Carville and Begala were about to begin their talk. All of Ben Maurer's buttons could not prevent his being hustled off by B&N security as Mr. Carville made a totally appropriate reference to Maurer's mental health deficit.

On July 1 I attended Bill Moyers' booksigning for "Moyers on Democracy" at the Union Square B&N. I got to the Q&A microphone first and was able to ask the human rights-eloquent Moyers his views as to whether a nation such as China, whose government is perpetrating Genocide in Tibet, should have the Olympics, a reality that I compared with the 1936 Hitler Olympics. As Mr. Moyers responded with a clear statement of opposition to the Beijing Olympics, Staten Island wacko Gary ("Enough") Phaneuf, attired in Tom Wolfe-emulating white, screamed "long live the People's Republic of China!" As Mr. Moyers put on his best emulation of a psychiatrist's smile, I pointed out to Mr. Moyers that it was only Gary Phaneuf. I did not however have the time, given the setting, of providing Mr. Moyers and the large crowd a more thorough psycho-social summary on Gary Phaneuf.

Gary Phaneuf, whose photo recently appeared in the Staten Island Advance when he showed up at a Vito Fossella event, could be labeled the Madman of Richmond County. Phaneuf is violent, having threatened me explicitlly on multiple occasions, in Union Square (where he has openly supported the neo-fascist Blank), on the Staten Island Ferry and on several Staten Island buses.

Phaneuf cannot rebut the very reliable report that some years ago he became physical with a German-speaking woman on the ferry who objected to his easily audible ranting about Adolf Hitler. In response to one of Phaneuf's threats againt me on the bus, I asked him about the fact that he reportedly had to be violently restained by the NYPD and then involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility (shades of Geoffrey Blank pal, Green Party and Ralph Nader LaRouche-ite Paul Zulkowitz). Phaneuf replied with one of his trademark Satanic smiles (also a Blank trademark) and bragged that he had gotten a modest financial settlement from the City of New York. (Phaneuf is a big guy who has a missing-link resemblance to a sasquatch, and who may have tested to police in an imitation of Hulk Hogan.)

Phaneuf in earlier days, used to sidle up to me on the ferry, often with (LaRouche ideo-
logue), Lenora Fulani literature and spout some left wing politics to me, generally heavy on a conspiracy or three, with endless references to the CIA and to WBAI. Once he told me that Ms. Fulani has tried to break into his home in Staten Island.

Gary Phaneuf is entitled to his many delusions but, like Geoffrey Blank and others such as Paul Zulkowitz and Nader-ite/Fulaniites Greens Jerry Kann and George Tatevosayn, they cannot violate my civil rights. All of these people, some in the Green Party and some working for Ralph Nader, are Fulaniite/LaRouche crypto-fascists and criminals. I intend to expose them as often as necessary as Gerald Kann learned again yesterday when he came to a Union Square speakout to ask people to support Ralph Nader, the man who helped give us eight years of Cheney/Bush.

Gary Phaneuf/Geoffrey Blank, Lenora Fulani and Lyndon LaRouche constitute another story covered by UP FRONT News and (still) buried by the Staten Island Advance.
* * * * * * *

UNION SQUARE SPEAKOUTS. THE LAROUCHE-ITES ARE BACK.DR. HECKLE (ME) AND MR. HIDE (JOEL MEYERS) KUCINICH-ITE "KIM" LOSES IT. IT'S GEOFFREY BLANK IN DRAG

UP FRONT News June 23, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/

By Tom Weiss

The bi-weekly (Thursdays and Sundays, starting at 5:00 PM) speakouts in Union Square, at least somewhat liberated from the toxic direct presence of the terrorism-friendly neo-fascist Lyndon LaRouche-ite psychopath Geoffrey Blank, are drawing steadily increasing numbers of observers and participants.

Organized in small "d" democratic, First Amendment-friendly, fashion by a loosely knit group including Eric Rassi, Roman Shusterman, Richie Degen, and myself, there have been open discussions on a range of issues, including the presidential election of 2008, the NYC election of 2009, 9/11, tenants rights, civil liberties, the LaRouche infiltration of the left (e.g. the Green Party, the Nader campaigns, "9/11 Truth", the speakouts), gentrification, capitalism, communism, fascism, Zionism, Palestinian rights, and other subjects.

The "rules" are minimal. Participants are given the use of the bullhorn (the permit-free use of which is granted under the U.S. Supreme Court's Saia Decision in 1948) for up to seven minutes at a time and are asked not to use profanity, racial or ethnic slurs, or personal insults.

Following the speakouts those interested have been meeting informally at nearby Toastie's to discuss continuing plans. Subjects discussed at the meetings have included taking on a name (e.g. Free Speech Coalition), fund raising, social events, political organizing, etc.

The events have not been without some controversy. For example, more than a few people who experienced the Geoffrey Blank dictatorship were surprised to find Blank's most persistent flunkie, Joel Me