THE VILLAGE VOICELESS WAYNE BARRETT: CENSOR

UP FRONT News June 12, 2005
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham

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

My first contact with The Village Voice took place in late 1977 or early 1978 when, in the possession of documents that proved that budget cuts were directly responsible for the deaths of several patients at City-operated Queens Hospital Center – where I was employed as a social worker and where I was an elected member of the Community Advisory Board and Chairman of the Board’s Patient Care Committee – I had concluded that the N.Y.C. Heath and Hospitals Corporation cover-up had gone far enough. That cover-up of patient care disasters that also involved systematic abuse of patients on the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric unit – a “Cuckoo’s Nest of racist abuse of mostly black patients by a mostly white staff – also included suspending me from my job, running me through a Soviet-style psychiatric gulag, and throwing me in jail.

Under the evidently naïve assumption that the purportedly progressive Village Voice would go after a story like this, I called the paper and was immediately given an appointment with then voice reporter Michael Daly – who has long since been liberated from that stifling, phony weekly and works at the much more honest New York Daily News. Mr. Daley and I met at his voice office for at least an hour, with him taking all the relevant documents and asking me lots of questions. We agreed to meet again, but set up no specific appointment.

When I called perhaps a week or two later, I learned that Daly had left the paper and that one Wayne Barrett had been assigned to follow the story. Barrett immediately gave me an appointment and we spent about two hours talking in his office. He was most friendly, evincing apparently sincere interest, and, following the interview, gave me a ride part way to my home, a loft on Duane Street in what is now Tribeca. When several follow-up calls from me went unanswered, I stopped in at his office about two weeks later to be “greeted” by Barrett, who immediately became verbally abusive, very, very loud, and threw me out of his office with insults, making suggestions about my mental health that sounded suspiciously like those being leveled at me by the folks responsible for the de facto Genocide going on in the City’s hospitals.

In any event, the story, which was, of course, killed by Barrett, was soon covered by, among much other media, The New York Times, the Daily News, and, most conspicuously and very thoroughly, by Newsday in its Queens Edition, with that paper placing me on its front page on March 1, 1978. Channel 11 News did a segment with me and articles were published in the Queens Tribune (which did an excellent job, that weekly being light years ahead of the weakly Voiceless when it comes to going after tough stories) and Our Town, among other media. Not at all surprisingly, the Voice’s right wing fraternal twin, the New York Post, also killed the Queens Hospital Center story, a matter involving nothing more serious than government executed political murder.

Over the years since, I’ve run into Barrett a number of times. Not at all surprisingly, he remembers me. And, also not at all surprisingly, this totally corrupt journalist has told me several times, that he will never mention my name in anything he writes. He also evidently lied when, following his acceptance of documents I left at the Voiceless about the Genocide in Tibet, he evidently failed to follow up on his promise, made during a telephone conversation with me that he would deliver the documents to Matthew Ridgeway, who covers international affairs for this pathetic excuse for a newspaper. I spoke to Ridgeway over the phone a few weeks after Barrett got my stuff, and he told me he never got anything from Barrett.

Wayne Barrett is under the impression that his umpteenth story about the fact that Governor George Pataki is corrupt constitutes some kind of investigative journalistic coup. The stunning news that Pataki is corrupt is about as shocking as the earthshaking report that George Steinbrenner is arrogant, or, for that matter, that Steinbrenner employee Alex Rodriguez is not eligible for Section 8 housing.

Except taking into account salary considerations, why competent reporters such as Sydney Schanberg, Nat Hentoff and Tom Robbins work for that paper, is beyond me. The Village Voice, once a tribune of solid investigative journalism, is descending into a netherworld with the paper now being of interest mainly to club-hoppers looking for hip experiences in Manhattan as well as rich folks looking for homes that millions of the rest of us could never afford. And, perhaps worst of all, now that the paper is free (after all, why would anyone pay for it?), all the Voiceless does is contribute to New York City’s litter problem.

The Voiceless is, indeed, the bottom of the Barrett.
Tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
******

A 'Nut' Takes On the Hospitals

Newsday Wednesday, March 1, 1978

Hospitals Fight Attack by a ‘Nut’
But lately some people have been listening seriously to the charges made by Tom Weiss.

By Joseph M. Treen

It was pouring rain in Queens last fall when Layhmond Robinson, a public relations man for the city’s Health and Hospital’s corp., first saw Tom Weiss, Weiss an about-to-be-fired social worker at the Queens Hospital center in Jamaica, was handing out leaflets, Robinson was waiting for a bus. “Handing out leaflets in the rain, Robinson recalled. “I thought that guy was nuts.”

There are many others who have said they think that Tom Weiss is nuts – many more since he “went public” in September and began handing out sheaves of documents in an attack on Robinson’s Hospital Corp. Weiss says the documents show needless patient deaths have been caused at the Jamaica hospital by understaffing and poor management – a situation which he believes the hospital is trying to cover up. Weiss took the documents to city Councilmen, to assemblymen, to congressmen, to senators both state and federal, even to the white house. He passed them out in Albany and in Washington and, late one night in Binghamton, he dropped off a set at the front door of State Senate Majority Leader Warren Anderson. Weiss thrust them into the hands of politicians at campaign rallies; he called on editors and reporters at every major daily and weekly newspaper in New York City.

But for a while nothing happened.
Oh, he was interviewed on an all-night FM talk show; and the State Health Department, which is required by law to look into all hospital complaints from private citizens, said it was studying Weiss’ documents. One TV news program even reported the state study. But nothing really happened.

Not until Feb. 16, that is, when it became known that Queens District Attorney John Santucci was looking into three unexplained deaths at another Queens hospital run by the Health and Hospitals Corp; the hospital in Elmhurst.

The following Monday, George Washington’s birthday, Assemblyman Charles E. Schumer (D. Brooklyn) “released” Weiss’s documents. The newspapers, which had ignored Weiss before, now reported the contents of the documents. And suddenly, Weiss was hot. His name was in the newspapers, Mayor Edward I. Koch who by Weiss’s account had received three sets of documents, called for an investigation.

As expected the Health and Hospital Corp. denied the allegations. But it did more than that. Its spokesmen, on the record and for attribution, said that Weiss had “emotional and probably mental problems.” They said that, those problems were why he had been fired from his job. That made public the question that had thwarted Weiss from the beginning; was he a “Serpico” or was he a nut?

Weiss, who will be 35 tomorrow, does not make the question easy to answer. He is consumed by his subject, carrying one and sometimes two satchels of memos and letters over his shoulders, presenting his case in elaborate detail to almost anyone who will listen. He is persistent, almost always in motion, and speaks rapidly with his hands (even while driving). He lives alone in a fifth-floor walkup loft near City Hall, plays the guitar and piano, loves tennis and softball, but spends most, if not all, of his time pushing his case.

Those he worked for call him a nut, a troublemaker who had to be fired because his outbursts disturbed patients. Those he worked with say that he was a dedicated, kind, able social worker and contend that his mental state is a false issue contrived by the Health and Hospital’s Corp. to discredit him. “Weiss may have his emotional problems,” said one former doctor at the hospital, “but he’s not exaggerating about bad conditions and mismanagement there.”

Weiss agrees that he did have mental problems about a year ago: a case of depression which was cured he said, with medication. Ironically, he says, while depressed, he did not agitate for better patient care. It was only after he recovered, he said, that he resumed filing memos and complaints. And it was then, on July 19, 1977, that he was suspended.

According to the Hospital Corp. records of his firing, Weiss was demonstrating “inappropriate behavior,” had been “excessively absent,” had been “incompetent,” had defied his superiors by holding a patient meeting to which he brought (Weiss says he brought it unwittingly) “a lunch bag infested with roaches,” and had refused “to submit to a psychiatric examination.”

But according to Kathy Friedman, the head of the hospital’s community advisory board, the charges were trumped up. “Tom is certainly hyperactive,” she said. “But if anyone should have known how to handle someone with emotional problems, it was the [psychiatric] department he worked in. They just didn’t handle it properly.”

Weiss was suspended and later fired because, she said, he had agitated too much for better patient care. Such agitation, as Weiss saw it, was part of his job. In 1974, he had been elected the social workers’ representative on the Community Advisory Board and was made head of its Patient Care Subcommittee. As such, Weiss heard many complaints of poor care and often passed them on to the hospital administration.

After the fiscal crisis, Weiss said, his major complaint was patient deaths. “I’ve seen deaths all along,” he said. “The hospital has always been understaffed but the budget cuts took a bad situation and made it critical…The deaths ranged into the hundreds and into the thousands. I can’t give you the names but they were many.” He paused. “Many, Very many.”

The Hospital Corp. soon focused on only one charge against Weiss; his refusal to undergo a psychiatric examination, required by law of civil service employees when they are ordered to do so by their superiors. Weiss says he discovered that a file of derogatory material was being sent by the Hospital’s Corp. to the psychiatrist that it had chosen. He therefore broke an appointment, which he says he later rescheduled. The Hospital Corp. says that the appointment was not rescheduled and that Weiss was being insubordinate.

In January, after his case had been delayed by an unsuccessful legal challenge which he made in State Supreme Court, Weiss was “terminated.” He had filed an appeal and has, he says, also seen the Hospital Corp. psychiatric Hospital Corp. Vice President for personnel Ross E. Taylor says that the Hospital Corp’s final review panel will probably hear Weiss’ case before the end of March. Taylor says he doesn’t know whether Weiss saw the psychiatrist, but adds that he isn’t sure that it could make any difference since Weiss refused an examination when he was ordered to undergo one.

Last August, a month after Weiss had been suspended, he was arrested on the charge of trespassing on hospital grounds. The charges were later “adjourned contemplating dismissal,” meaning that they would be dropped if Weiss kept out of trouble for six months. But the suspension and a night in jail left Weiss angry and bitter. In September, he “went public.”

The documents that he distributed were a series of memos on hospital stationary which discussed the 1976 deaths of five patients and attributed them to staff shortages and “inadequate attention.”(One of the memos was under the signature of Dr. Canute Bernard, now on the staff of Harlem Hospital. In previously published reports, a spokesman for Bernard said the memo was a forgery. However, his attorney, Miriam Robinson, said yesterday that Bernard would neither confirm nor deny that allegation.)

Weiss took the memos mainly to politicians who were either from Queens or on health or appropriation committees. Because he went to college in Binghamton before attending and being graduated from Queens College, he also gave them to Binghamton politicians. Mrs. Friedman calls Weiss’s action “a bit of a vendetta,” and Weiss admits to “an element of revenge.” But he says that there is more to it than that. “I consider the matter to be of considerable importance because it involves lies,” he says. “It’s not a reasonably minor violation of patients rights – a loss of a bedpan, something like that’ its lives. And secondly there is the cover-up aspect to all of this.”


Staff Shortage Called Critical
By John Cummings

Jamaica – Tom Weiss, a former social worker who has been charging that staff shortages resulted in five patient deaths at the Queens Hospital Center here, advised the center’s community board last night to fight any further reduction in the nursing staff.

His statement came after the board voted to investigate the deaths, alleged to have occurred because of hospital mismanagement and nursing shortages, and asked Weiss to address it about the situation – now under investigation by the mayor’s office.

The Health and Hospitals Corp. which operates the city hospitals, has denied any mismanagement and said that Weiss was suspended from his job because of “emotional problems.” The Hospital Corp. has also charged that a memo said to have been written by Dr. Canute Bernard, former community board chairman, and offered in support of the charges is a forgery. It was among the memos provided by Weiss last week.

Weiss, who said he had feared that he would be arrested on entering the hospital grounds where the board meeting was held last night, spoke without incident. He told the board forcefully: “Check everything [concerning the deaths] very carefully and do not rely blindly on the hospital administration.” He added that if nursing shortages were responsible for the five deaths in 1978, the situation now was “as bad or worse.” “You should not only fight further cuts in staff, but fight to have to restore cuts made since,” Weiss told the board members.

To investigate the deaths and their relation, if any to the nursing cutbacks, the board voted to create what it called an ad-hoc committee of five of its members. The motion was approved by a vote of 8-5 with four abstentions after several members said they felt that community board should await the outcome of the investigation ordered by Mayor Edward Koch, to be carried out by the Hospitals Corp.

The situation at the Jamaica center is not directly related to the Queens district attorney’s investigation into the deaths of three patients at the center at Elmhurst where three patients died in recent months after their respirators had been disconnected and the alarms were apparently turned off. That investigation apparently involves, among other aspects, the possibility that overworked staff turned off the warning devices because they kept going off even when the respirators were otherwise working perfectly.
Tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
******

ICONS OF GREED AND THE TRUMP EFFECT

UP FRONT News June 1, 2005
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham

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

The following are some of the causes of homelessness, a condition closely associated with economic deprivation: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alex Rodriguez, Bernard Ebbers, Martha Stewart, Puff Diddy, Kenneth Lay, David Letterman, Michael Eisner, Donald Trump, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barbra Streisand, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Richard Grasso, James Gandolfini, and “Friends.”

This list, consisting of some of the most talented and greediest members of the ruling class, could, of course, be much longer. Although most fields of endeavor have greed merchants, it seems evident that many of the worst populate the domains of professional sports, film, politics (and its farm system, law), and business.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is selected because he was taking in a reported $30 million per gratuitous-violence-saturated movie before being elected governor of California, in which capacity he is now preaching austerity (and, presumably, in a further irony, abstinence from steroids). On the most direct level, the negative effect of the $30 million salary (for what is typically perhaps 4 months of work) is its contribution to the (at least in N.Y.C.) $10.00 movie ticket. The social consequences of this kind of egomaniacal reward go far beyond the movie theater.

Schwarzenegger is one of a slew of film stars who make up a very important segment of the ruling class, who have made it politically correct to demean the vast majority of human beings who struggle to make ends meet as well as those whose ends are unmet by demanding the kind of compensation associated with royalty. While there is much to be said for spiritual as compared with material value, unemployment, malnutrition, homelessness, are inimical to the health of the inner self. The material demands and acquisitions (“legal” as in, for example, A-Rod’s case, and illegal as is becoming persistently apparent with CEO’s in handcuffs) of those on the list above, among many others, skews the value of necessities and other comforts.

While there are numerous examples of greed at the top causing direct, and sometimes life-threatening, harm to those at or in the vicinity of the bottom (a case example being the power companies’ manipulation of electricity supplies and utility rates in California a couple of summers ago, the arena in which this kind of predatory relationship is the clearest is in real estate, which , since it is based on the ownership of the earth (and, presumably, soon, space) is the bottom line of economics.

There are any number of real estate greed merchants I could have chosen for the list above. Donald Trump was selected not only because of his acquisitiveness and Henry VIII life-style, but primarily because, despite the fact that he would not win any popularity contests among, for example, tenants associations, he has become a role model, essentially a charismatic spokesperson for the greed-is-good movement, a movement that gains new “apprentices” every second. The influence of Trump and his colleagues in New York real estate is enormous and, despite fluctuations (such as those generated by 9/11), it is always a sellers marker, in which the concept of decent, affordable housing is alien. Given these realities, and the fact that public funding for the many people who are economically disenfranchised from the housing market is marginal, it is little wonder that the number of homeless people, individuals and families, is increasing.

As a result little in the way of affordable housing is built and millions of units are demolished. In a world where the icons were under some kind of control acquisition-wise, development could be a definition for the improvement of conditions in and services to deteriorating communities, rather than the gentrification which essentially obliterates and replaces communities.

The subject of “executive compensation” (which includes A-Rod’s approximately $26 million/”yr” salary for a job that runs from March until – the Yankees hope – October, as surely as it includes the $150 million “compensation” package received by Richard Grasso courtesy of his friends at the New York Stock Exchange) is getting more attention in the media thanks to Enron’s position as the tip of the iceberg of lettuce. (As a measure of some almost serio-comical aspects of the Grasso-grab, a theoretically reformed NYSE reportedly asked Grasso to return about $50 million of the money, thereby implying that $100 million is okay.) But the only time the issue comes up is if there is a violation of law suspected (e.g. inflating earnings, insider trading, tax evasion). As far as I’m aware, there is no law preventing someone who has power to do so from receiving the kind of “compensation” that causes the kind of Trump-effect described above. I am hopeful that, beyond the matter of corporate crime, the key question of mega-salaries in the business, sports, entertainment, and other categories in the private sector world, becomes a political campaign issue.

Ralph Nader, who has talked about salary caps in business, suggested what is called the 30:1 ratio. Pointing out the cosmic difference between the lowest and the highest pay in many corporations, Mr. Nader has suggested that a law be enacted that would limit the highest salary in any company to 30 times the lowest. I would imagine that there might be many at the bottom of the wage scale who would suggest a smaller differential. And I’m certain that the boys and girls on the list would like to keep things just as they are.
Tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
******