Saturday, December 24, 2005

HOW HILLARY CLINTON, WITH A THREAT, KEPT ME HOMELESS AND PENNILESS

UP FRONT News December 31, 2005
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham

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

There’s been a lot of attention given to a “threat” allegedly made by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against a supporter of one of the avaricious CEO’s that Mr. Spitzer is beleaguering. What follows is the story of the very real threat against me, generated personally by U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a threat which had the apparently intended affect of keeping me homeless and penniless.

The Social Security law has an all too obscure provision whereby, in the event of extenuating circumstances, a Social Security beneficiary, such as myself, can receive an expedited check. An expedited check is one that is delivered prior to the normal due date, which in my case is the second Wednesday of every month. In 2001, I ran into a serious emergency which left me without money. I learned that an expedited check can only be authorized by the office of the Commissioner of the U.S. Social Security Administration, not by a regional or local official, provided some documentation from a representative for the beneficiary is sent to the Commissioner. My, minister, Rev. Dr. Timothy P. Mitchell, Pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, in Flushing Queens, at my request, faxed an urgent letter to the Commissioner at the time and, within a couple of days, I received an expedited check.

Another emergency developed a few years later – emergencies being more acute when one is homeless. At the time, I was actively lobbying legislators to introduce and pass resolutions in support of a Free Tibet. Among the legislators I contacted was New York State Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV, (D.-East Harlem). My main contact was with Mr. Powell’s Chief of Staff Daniel Serrano. Mr. Serrano took a great interest in the Tibet matter and soon arranged for a letter to me confirming the Assemblyman’s support for such a resolution.

Mr. Serrano was particularly fascinated by my account of, among other matters, my arrest in the reception area of the hearing room of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations at U.S. Capital on January 19, 1993, the day before newly elected President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. I had come to Washington, with an official invitation, to testify against Clinton’s nomination of Warren Christopher as Secretary of State. I was to testify against him because he had buried a wealth of evidence I had gotten to him by fax about the nazi-style Genocide being perpetrated by Communist China in Occupied Tibet. The material had also been copied and given to Clinton and George Stephanopoulos by Clinton secretary Betty M. Currie, who also ran Mr. Clinton’s “Transition” office in Little Rock. I had talked to Ms. Currie at some length over the phone, and, at her request, faxed a great deal of material about the Genocide to her to give to Clinton, Christopher, and Stephanopoulos. I have a copy of Ms. Currie’s faxed acknowledgement to me. I also have acknowledgement faxes from several other Clinton staffers. Clinton, Christopher, and Stephanopoulos (I had also spoken at length to Stephanopoulos’ secretary “Amanda” at the time) were evidently not thrilled over the idea of my blowing the whistle on the American corporate involvement in the Genocide in Tibet. And so they arranged to have me arrested when I arrived for the hearing. They claimed that I had “threatened” a Committee staffer. With the full support of my legal aide attorney, I rejected a Clinton Administration offer to accept responsibility for my arrest and went to trial. It took a jury in Washington D.C. about two hours to acquit me, as the Capital Police testimony was so obviously perjured that only a jury in which all members were Hillary Clinton or Mao Zedong would have decided otherwise.

Mr. Serrano also asked me many questions about my own situation. I told him of my very precarious financial and homeless situation and of my need for an expedited check. (I did not want, for a number of reasons, to make another request of Rev. Mitchell at the time.) Mr. Serrano immediately offered his help, explaining that his wife Yahaira Yepez, works for Senator Hillary Clinton. Within perhaps an hour, Mr. Serrano had e-mailed a letter to Ms. Yepez and, within a very few days, following a fax, marked “urgent” to Social Security from Ms. Yepez, I got a check.

Some months later, while I was still homeless and, in order to avoid further staff abuse at a drop-in center known as Peter’s Place (a.k.a. in UP FRONT News as “Auschwitz Lite”) I was staying at the Hotel Richmond, a sleazy, but rationally priced, hotel in Staten Island, I faced another financial emergency because I was robbed of my rent money. I tried to contact Ms. Yepez, who worked in Clinton’s Manhattan office on 3rd Avenue. Numerous phone calls yielded no response. Letters to Ms. Clinton were not accepted at her Manhattan office. I called her Washington office. My second or third call was answered by a man who identified himself as “Mr. Zimmerman, investigator for the Democratic Party”, and who said to me, verbatim, “Mrs. Clinton has asked me to take all your calls.” Most of the next fifteen minutes or so were taken up by Mr. Zimmerman, referring to a computer data base, reading my political history back to me. He took care to mention my arrest in 1977 at Queens Hospital Center, where I was undergoing major human rights violations because of my efforts to blow the whistle on a major cover-up of budget cut-caused patient deaths at that City-operated facility. That cover-up, by the way involved Mayor Ed Koch. It was apparent that Mr. Zimmerman did not get his information from, for example, Newsday, which, in its then Queens edition, gave me front page coverage. (The story was also covered in the New York Times, the Daily News, WPIX, Channel 11 News, and much other media.) Directed by Hillary Clinton, he could only have gotten all that data from law enforcement, i.e. the FBI.) That last thing that Mr. Zimmerman said to me – a statement I regard as a threat – was, “You better not call here again.”

In any event, Hillary Clinton – later aided and abetted by her political flunkies in Staten Island, State Assemblyman John Lavelle and State Senator Diane Savino (whose Chief of Staff Richard Cataldo almost became violent when I visited her office on Richmond Terrace – left me homeless and penniless. And so did Big Dick Cheney’s favorite NYC politician, Congressman Vito Fossella. Fortunately, Pastor Mitchell, my cousin, author Kathy Perutz, and other friends came through for me.

As far as I am concerned, Hillary Clinton, in so many ways, from attaching political considerations to the provision of mandated constituent services, to her condoning of war crimes, both by her husband and by her de facto ally George W. Bush, to her de facto war against the poor and the homeless, has violated her oath of office. And, because she is in the business of making threats against at least this constituent, law enforcement must be notified.
Tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
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