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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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