UP FRONT News November 24, 2012
"The paper that can't bve bought and can't be sold."
Published by Tom Weiss
Media Representative and Economics Advisor - Andrew Mazzone
Literary Editor - Maria Loginova
The views expressed in UP FRONT News are those of the publisher or of the contributing writer and do not necessarily represent the views of staff.
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THE TROUBLEMAKER(S)
The journey that had led me to the considered conclusion that Staten Island (Richmond County) is the most politically corrupt borough of New York City and perhaps the most corrupt county in the entire Empire State probably began in 1977 while I was a social worker employed at NYC-operated Queens Hospital Center (QHC). I was already perceived by the powers that were as a "troublemaker" by virtue of my activities as an elected union shop steward (first in what was then Local 1199 and later in District Council 37) and as the elected social workers' representative and Chairperson of the Patient Care Committee of the QHC Community Advisory Board.
I had been very active in organizing protests against budget cuts imposed by the governments of New York City, New York State with the collusion of the federal government ([President Gerald] Ford to New York City, "Drop Dead") as part of the genocidal policy of "planned shrinkage" (a euphemism for service reductions to the poor demanded by the banks whose usurious lending policies had precipitated the world famous NYC "fiscal crisis" of 1975-1976). It was as I was sitting in my office at QHC that an attending physician snuck into my office and, after extracting from me a pledge to maintain his anonymity as the source, told me that several patients had died as a direct result of the budget cuts, which had decimated the already frayed nursing staff.
After getting the facts from Dr. X., I immediately send a memo to the QHC Executive Director, Leroy Carmichael, a political appointee put in place by the late (by subsequent suicide) Queens Borough President Donald Manes. That's when the political coverup began. Because I had also complained about racist abuse of psychiatric patients at QHC I was already being lined up for firing, which followed shortly after I wrote that memo to Carmichael. Because the New York City Health & Hospitals Corporation, the politically controlled agency that operates QHC, could not come up with any complaints about my performance of my social work responsibilities they brought into play a regulation known as "Operating Procedure 20-33" that could have been drafted by Josef Stalin himself, that enabled the HHC to suspend me as "medically unfit." They also arrested me when, under an arrangement worked out between the QHC Administation and my D.C. 37 representative, I arrived at the Hospital to get personal belongings left in my office.
Although the Union, then led by Victor Gotbaum (with whose seriously paranoid wife, ex NYC Public Advocate Betsy, with whom I've been personally acquainted since 1979, and with whom I've had serious political confrontations) was contractually obligated to represent me through the grievance process, Mr. Gotbaum was not happy with my public protests about budget cuts and his playing footsie with the City during contract negotiations while spouting militant anti-management rhetoric.
The charge of "obstructing governmental administration" that led to my arrest was ultimately dismissed, a matter with which Union did not help me. The Union raised no objections to a management-favoring grievance procedure and the fundamentally un-Constitutional "Operating Procedure 20-33" and, after I got done with that (which ended the Union's contractual obligation as regards representing me), I retained perhaps the best civil rights lawyer in the world, Ramsey Clark (who had earlier given me a free consultation in his Greenwich Village home as I sipped tea with the cactus honey made by bees from Mr. Clark's hometown of Uvalde, Texas). Mr. Clark made it very clear that he was accepting he case because government of the City of New York had fundamentally violated my civil rights. He simultaneously told me that because the judge who was to rule on my appeal was politically connected to the Ed Koch Administration (Koch was personally involved in the coverup of the budget cut-caused patient deaths and the abuse of psychiatric patients at QHC) my chances of a favorable ruling were very small. Mr. Clark was of course correct. In order to win I would have to go into the federal courts, a process both prolonged and potentially very expensive. Because that would have involved enormous stress and probable financial help from my aged widowed father, I decided not to appeal further.
I did however, pursue justice for the patients and medical staff at QHC. Most of the politicians (many of them in Ed Koch's pocket) participated in the coverup. And so I paid a visit to Ms. Madeline Penachio, the Patient Advocate for the NYS Department of Health. She and I met at her office at the late World Trade Center. I gave her the necessary documents. About a week later I received a letter from her stating that her office had investigated and that my complaint had been "substantiated." A few hours later, the Commissioner of the Health Department issued a press release confirming what I had been alleging from the beginning. And a few hours after that I was being interviewed by WPIX-TV political reporter Jeff Kamen for the 10PM News.
Among the politicians I contacted was then NYS Assemblymember Charles Schumer, who was the Chairperson of the Assembly Committee on Oversight & Investigation, whose area of responsibility included the NYC Health & Hospitals Corpporation. I had a long meeting with Committee Counsel Dan Feldman, who later became an Assemblymember himself. A few days after our meeting, Feldman called me and told me, "We're going to go with this", explaining that Schumer was waiting for the right time. The "right time" arrived a few days later with huge headlines about several patients who had died at NYC-operated Elmhurst City Hospital in Queens because a staffer had disconnected some respirators.
Schumer called a press conference, to which he did not invite me, and accused the HHC of covering up budget cut-caused deaths at QHC. The Daily News front page story was written by Bob Herbert, who later became a columnist for the New York Times. I had talked to Mr. Herbert by phone and some editions of the News made reference to me as the source. Later editions omitted that reference, as did a superficial story by The Times' health reporter Ron Sullivan, who had previously hung the phone up on me. Schumer, without question one of the most egotistical politicians since Nero, took the credit for the story.
The best coverage without question appeared in the Queens Edition of Newsday. The political editor at the time was investigative journalist Dennis Duggan. He assigned reporter Joseph Treen to interview me. The interview took place at my home at the time, a loft in TriBeCa. His story, the first of several in that paper about my political work, with a front page photo of me, appeared in Newsday's Queens Edition (now NYC Newsday) on March 1, 1978. He did a good job. There was also solid coverage in the Queens Tribune and some other media.
Among the casualties of all this has been my relationship with my younger brother Jim, who, for reasons that presumably only he can explain (but will not, inasmuch as he is notoriously closed-mouthed), accepted NYC version of events and, most grudgingly, provided a minimim of support as the political confrontation between the government of the City of New York and me unfolded. Despite a few passing armistices, it's only gotten worse since. From my perspective, although Jim and I are not twins, he is the Jacob to my Esau.
Presumably the major media coverage, supplemented by my letter to President Jimmy Carter, which generated a very supportive personal reply from his wife, Rosalynn, resulted in an emergency infusion of federal dollars into QHC.
It took some years - while I was essentially blacklisted - before I was able to get another job as a social worker. That didn't last long because among the people in charge at the senior center where I worked were some politically connected folks including a former City Councilmember who was up to his eyeballs in the QHC coverup.
In the years that followed, e.g. while I was the director of social services at a homeless shelter in Yonkers and the legislative representative for the Coalition for the Homeless of Westchester (CHOW) and the Director of an anti-hunger program in the Bronx, I did not endear myself to the Reagan Administration, which launched an all-out war in the poor with its "supply side" economics, which generated budget deficits for which the economically disenfranchised paid the price. Among those targeted politically by Reagan and his New York errand-boy Governor George Pataki, was a "conservative", libertarian-oriented Republican congressman from Westchester named Joe DioGuardi, whose views on poverty underwent a dramatic - and, from the Reagan-Pataki perspective, seditious - change after he met me. Indeed, Mr. DioGuardi became a vocal advocate for housing for the poor and increased funding for anti-hunger programs, positions which led to his being denied the Republican nomination for Congress after two terms. I was the "troublemaker."
I was also a "troublemaker" at my loft home in pre-gentrified TriBeCa. My landlord, a very public Orthodox Jew from Forest Hills, Queens and Ed Koch pal named Thomas Berger (re-named in UP FRONT News as "The Greed Merchant of TriBeCa") kept me without heat and water for 5 1/2 years in my home on the top floor of 190-A Duane St. He sent in thugs, one of whom held a knife against my throat; he collaborated with sellout tenant advocates such as self-appointed leader of the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants Chuck ("Ol' Loophole") Delaney and Mike ("The Knife") McKee to weaken rent protection legislation for residential loft tenants, enabling him to rent-gouge me. He finally was able to fully gentrify 190-A Duane Street, courtesy of a corrupt, reportedly gender-biased judge named Marilyn Shafer who, throughout the trial in Landlord & Tenant Court, protected a Berger-collaborating female tenant. Shafer ruled to evict me because I allowed someone to play a flute at a poetry reading at my home. No, I am not making this up!
The battle over 190-A Duane Street was reported in several newspapers, including front page coverage by John Strausbaugh in the (now longer published) New York Press, the Daily News, the Chelsea-Clinton News, the Downtown Express, the Sunday New York Times, and the New York Post. Troublemaker.
I even got into serious trouble with Bill Clinton and later his vindictive wife. During my years as a social worker at a refugee resettlement agency, I became acquainted with number of Tibetan exiles, including a nephew of the Dalai Lama. I got a lot of information about what is in fact probably the longest running Genocide in the world today, that being perpetrated by the racist government of Communist China against the dark-complexioned people and nation of Occupied Tibet.
Because Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton campaigned for "human rights" and voiced some strong criticism of U.S. trade policies benefiting the mega-corporations doing business with the genocidal government of China, I supported Clinton. After he won the November, 1992 election I contacted his Transition Office in Little Rock, Ark. I spoke by phone with Betty M. Currie, Bill Clinton's secretary. She became so upset over my graphic descriptions of some of the Nazi-style tortures inflicted on Tibetans by their Communist Chinese oppressors that she asked me to send her some of my UP FRONT News articles and other literature to give to President-elect Bill Clinton and Transition Office Chief and about-to-be Secretary of State Warren Christopher. She told me that I would get a response, probably from Mr. Christopher. I agreed to Ms. Currie's request, with the understanding that she would fax me an acknowledgement of receipt of my correspondence. I kept my promise and faxed her a bunch of Tibet Genocide-related UP FRONT News articles and other material and Ms. Currie kept her promise and at 4:38 PM on December 11, 1992 from fax location 501-399-7196 sent me her fax, "Mr. Tom Weiss This is to acknowledge receipt of your fax on Tibet. Betty M. Currie December 11, 1992." I also received a faxed acknowledgement from Transition Office staffer Brooke Darby.
Some days later I called and spoke again to Betty Currie. She told me that she had given the documents directly to Warren Christopher and that I should expect a response. After some more days, receiving nothing I called again. On this occasion Ms. Currie told me that she had given a second set of the documents to Mr. Christopher and also gave a set to Bill Clinton. She also suggested that I speak with Communications Director George Stephanopoulos. I spoke to Mr. Stephanopoulos's secretary, the very southern- dialected "Amanda", and, aside from discussing Tibet, Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher and Betty Currie, I told her about a great country song titled "Amanda" recorded by, among others, Don Williams and Waylon Jennings.
I never heard from Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher or George Stephanopoulos.
While all this was going on I received in the mail a fancy invitation to attend the January 19, 1993 hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the nomination of Warren Christopher to be Secretary of State. That invitation came from the Committee, which was chaired by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y.), a Tibet supporter who was aware of my Free Tibet activities, some of which were reported in the media. The Christopher hearing had been delayed until January 19, 1993, the day before Bill Clinton's inauguration, because of reports that Christopher had been involved in snooping on anti-Viet Nam War activists.
With a UP FRONT News associate I arrived in the reception area of the Committee hearing room in the U.S. Capitol Building. As I was getting my invitation letter out of my bag to show Committee office manager Ms. Mason, several U.S. Capitol Police showed up, ordered me to leave and when I told them I was an invited reporter, arrested me on the spot. My one phone call went to my congressman at the time, Jerrold Nadler.
On the morning after my night behind bars in Washington D.C.'s "Central Cellblock" I was greeted by a lady with a large Afro resembling Angela Davis. She told me that she was my public defender lawyer and that she had asked for my case because she specializes in civil rights cases. She got me released and after my meeting with her, as Bill Clinton as being inaugurated, I returned to my hotel and then back to New York City.
Several days later I was contacted by the lawyer (whose name I do not recall) who told me that she had been contacted by the Clinton Administration, which was offering me a plea bargain in exchange for an admission on my part that I was responsible for having been arrested. I was relieved when, in response to my immediate and unequivocal refusal to surrender my Constitutional rights, my lawyer said she agreed with me 100% and that we would go to trial.
The trial, before Judge Leo Satterfield, took place in July, 1993. The cops committed perjury by claiming that I had "threatened" Ms. Mason. Under cross-examination by my attorney, Ms. Mason told the truth and the jury took about two hours to acquit me.
As I was chatting with the jurors after the verdict, a reporter approached me and asked me if I knew the fellow (who bore a strong resemblance to both Frankenstein and The Munster) watching the two day trial and who bolted from the courtroom moments after the verdict was read. I said "no." The repotrer identified him as the #3 man in the Clinton-Christopher State Department.
Whether my arrest was ordered personally by Bill Clinton and/or Warren Christopher I don't know. What I do know is that Bill Clinton and his wife are among the politicians who play ball with the profiteering multinational corporations doing mega-business in the de facto fascist state of "Communist" China and are therefore directly involved in the political and media coverup of the Genocide in Tibet and who regard me as a "troublemaker."
That is why as I learned some years ago from a staffer in Sen. Hillary Clinton's office identifying himself over the phone as "Mr. Zimmerman" that Mrs. Clinton has had me under surveillance and why, some years ago, she had a staffer send a defamatory e-mail about me to my brother Jim in upstate New York.
My very public Free Tibet advocacy has also gotten me into "trouble" with the professional "left", which sometimes includes pseudo-ultra-"leftists" at least ideologically tied to the aging but still politically menacing racist megalomaniac Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., a de facto fascist openly supportive of Communist China and as always hostile to Jewish people. That fact is what led to the very public political war between me and a pseudo-ultra-"left" conspiracy theorist named Geoffrey Blank, a demagogue from the Rockaway area of Queens, who hijacked the post-9/11 No Police State Coalition-organized speakouts in Union Square to hog the bullhorn, threaten others (principally me) to promote the LaRouche theory that George W. Bush had personal prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. It took months of exposure of Geoffrey Blank in UP FRONT News before his younger brother Jason elliptically admitted that Geoffrey is a LaRouche-ite. The so-called "9/11 Truth"/"We Are Change" group, dictatorially run by autocratic conspiracy theorists such as Les Jamieson and Luke Rudkowski (who used to sell LaRouche propaganda at the cult's meetings at the St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church in the East Village, featured explicit threats of violence against me
as well as "guest speakers" from the LaRouche world such as Geoffrey Blank and Webster Tarpley. A young video-journalist named Dan Wallace who interviewed me outside St. Mark's and revealed to me how he and his girl-friendc Samantha had been stalked for months by LaRouche people, came to a LaRouche-style end. A few weeks after he did the interview with me, Samantha found the 21 year old Wallace stone dead in bed in their apartment in Queens. The official "cause of death" was "drug overdose." Oozing a tsumani of crocodile tears was Wallace self-claimed "best friend" Rudkowski. And, a couple of weeks after Wallace's death, when I saw Samantha at a meeting, Rudkowski rather belligerently got in my face physically to block me from speaking with her. What were the "drugs" inside Dan Wallace and how did they get there? Polonium politics?
Other "left" often violent LaRouche-style ideologues, some embedded in the Occupy movement, include Eric Rassi (Lower East Side), Karl Rosenstein (LES), "Pistol" Pete Dolack (Brooklyn) Gary ("Enough") Phaneuf (Staten Island), Mike May (S.I.), Ugo Duran (S.I.), Julene Garcia (S.I.)
LaRouche style infiltration/takeover/autocracy politics have also entered the mini-movement dedicated to promoting the anti-monopolist economically democratic ideas put forth by the 19th century economist/activist/1886 NYC candidate for Mayor Henry George. A Henry George advocacy group calling itself Common Ground-NYC was literally hijacked by a shifty character named Scott ("The Faker") Baker who had himself anointed "president" and proceeded to establish an autocracy. Guess who became the "troublemaker?"
I had also run into some serious confrontations with people directly connected to the LaRouche-ideologued duo of the African-American Jew-hater Lenora Fulani and self-hating Jewish "social therapy" cult "psychotherapist" "Dr." Fred newman, who had pretty much taken over the Green Party Ralph Nader for President operation in New York in 2000. The LaRouche strategy was to rhetorically bash the, (relatively speaking), right (Republican George W. Bush) and (again relatively speaking) left (Democrat Al Gore) equally, thus enabling Cheney/Bush to get close enough to steal the election, setting off reactionary anti-poor policies angering the masses and creating the social conditions on which fascism thrives as it did in post-World War I Germany. The LaRouche-ite Fulani/Newmanites, spewing ultra-left populist rhetoric, included NYC Nader meet-up "facilitator" (read dictator) Cathy Sadell and her violent partner George Tatevosyan and the smooth-talking "peace"-mouth Paul ("Zool") Zulkowitz, a de facto ally of the aforementioned Eric Rassi, and the demagogue of Union Square Geoffrey Blank, himself an ally of Mike May, the recurrently explosively violent self-defined "green anarchist" Mike May.
And that brings me to Staten Island, New York's most politically corrupt borough.
The Manhattan-centric stereotype of Staten Island as populated largely by cops, firemen and Republicans is an exaggeration. The ethnically diverse North Shore of S.I. (where I live, following a period of loftlord Thomas Berger/Judge Marilyn Shafer-created homelessness I experienced for several years) is in fact run by a fundamentally corrupt Tammany Hall-style Democratic Party Machine. Among my first experiences with that machine occurred when I was homeless and needed some emergency help and was referred to one Robert Cataldo, the Chief of Staff to New York State Senator Democrat Diane Savino. When I showed up at Savino's District office at 36 Richmond Terrace a few blocks from the St. George Staten Island Ferry Terminal for my scheduled appointment, in an otherwise empty office Cataldo went completely berserk, threatening me with violence and arrest in a profanity-laced tirade that would have gotten him committed to South Beach Psychiatric Center had it occurred in public. The NYPD complaint # is 2006-120-8244. He is still drawing a taxpayer-financed check as Savino's Chief of Staff.
The North Shore City Councilmember, who violated campaign finance regulations on her way to being (s)elected, who purports to represent all her constituents, is Democrat Debi Rose, the first African-American City Councilmember from S.I. I was unaware of her secret campaign finance violations and indeed supported her candidacy. Debi Rose is directly involved in a political coverup of civil rights violations (e.g. against me) taking place at government-funded "non-profit" corporatioon-operated senior citizens centers. When on July 6, 2011 at a meeting I had with her, I attempted to give Ms. Rose a document proving the civil rights violations, she walked out of the room, thereby allowing her thug-staffer Antonio Whitaker to physically bully me (NYPD Complaint #2011-001-05817) and tried to have me arrested. She has since colluded with her political Mother Superior Council Speaker and NYC Mayor-Empress wannabe Christine Quinn to have me threatened with arrest on September 22, 2011 when I arrived for a City Council hearing with an invitation from Councilmember James Gennaro (D.-Queens) to testify in fracking before his Committee on Environmental Protection.
Perhaps the most pathetic of all is NYS Assemblymember Matthew Titone, perhaps the only (s)elected official to be (s)elected not for his qualifications but because the corrupt NYC Council speaker and Mayor-Empress wannabe Christine Quinn had to have an openly gay pol in place in S.I. Titone has refused to provide me constituent services since he assumed office by anointment following the death of his predecessor, John Lavelle. I happen to be for full gay rights. Christine Quinn and Matthew Titone's are examples of gay wrongs.
Staten Island has an perhaps not overly exaggerated reputation as a borough in which racism persists and is growing. After Barack Obama won in 2008, a young African-American man was viciously attacked by racist-invective hurling thugs.
Among the more vocal voices in defense of African-American victims of racist abuse has been Rev. Dr. Demetrius S. Carolina, the pastor of the largely African-American First Central Baptist Church (FCBC) in the Stapleton neighborhood of North Shore S.I.. I've been a member of that church for several years. I am a baptized - not converted - Jewish person, the baptism having been done some years ago by Rev. Dr. Timothy P. Mitchell, the late pastor of the largely African-American Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church (now Ebenezer Baptist Church) in Flushing, Queens, years ago. I had met Dr. Mitchell, a close friend and associate of Dr. King, during my years at Queens Hospital Center. Dr. Mitchell dealt decisively with a small number of ill-behaved reactionaries in his church who resented my becoming a member.
There have been a few First Central Baptist Church-connected people who also appear to have an ethnicity problem with me. They are Deacon Alphonso Britt, FCBC appointments secretary Vanina Melendez, FCBC-run Central Family Life Center (CFLC) maintenance man Mark Givens, and CFLC staffer (and Debi Rose pal) Larry Breslow. Last September 7 when I attempted to give then NYS Senatorial candidate Lisa Grey an envelope containing some news articles about me while she and I were in the FCBC lobby after a service, the football tackle-sized Britt blocked my way and twice push-poked me in the chest - an act of physical aggression not witnessed by Dr. Carolina, who was in the chapel. Ms. Melendez has on multiple occasions fouled up scheduled appointments for me with Dr. Carolina, most recently last October 11, an appointment that included UP FRONT News Media Representative and Economics Advisor Andrew Mazzone. Mr. Givens some months ago interrupted me as I was speaking at a meeting of the Staten Island branch of the NAACP at the CFLC, and went berserk, attempting to throw a table at me while repeatedly bellowing an accusation that I have had sexual relations with my mother. Larry Breslow some years ago interrupted a conversation on Church property that I was having with Sally Jones, the president of the extremist-(e.g. Mike May)-riddled Peace Action of Staten Island and began bellowing insults at me. That precipitated a near assault on me perpetrated by the virulently anti-Semitic David Jones (Sally's spouse), who also served as Debi Rose's campaign manager. Larry Breslow is the closest approximation of a full-fledged (card-carrying) Pharisee that I know.
Dr. Carolina, not known for reticence on some human rights issues - e.g. mistreatment of African-Americans, the Chinese Communist Genocide in Occupied Tibet, (that becoming a part of Carolina's agenda as a direct result of his conversations with me and my articles in UP FRONT News) - has been
disturbingly silent on the issue of anti-Semitism in Staten Island and, apparently, in his church.
One of the realities that renders Staten Island as almost uniquely politically corrupt is that its mainstream paper of record, the Staten Island Advance -
once (properly I believe) described by African-American Staten Island political activist Kelvin Alexander as "the most racist paper in New York" - is easily the most politically corrupt paper in New York - and perhaps America. The Advance is not "liberal" or "conservative." It can shift ideologically as sleazily as Lyndon LaRouche, well-known for his ultra-left/ultra right schizoid shifts. The Advance, owned by a multi-billionaire named Donald Newhouse and published by one-percenter Caroline Diamond Harrison, exists to protect whatever existing political establishment holds power. If the Advance were being published in 1941 Berlin, the paper would have protected the Nazis.
And so the Advance has willfully and knowingly suppressed hard evidence or corruption by the Unholy Trinity of Titone/Savino/Rose and well as hard evidence of serious police misconduct (against me) at the 120th precinct as well as hard evidence of anti-Semitism and LaRouche-style extremism in Staten Island. No wonder Staten Island is the "Forgotten Borough." Politically
speaking, The Staten Island Advance is, at best, forgettable.
The political editor at the Advance (re-named in UP FRONT News as the Staten Island Retreat) is a character exposed in my paper as "The worst
journalist in America. He is Tom ("Wrongleski") Wrobleski. It was Wrobleski to whom I was referred in the spring of 2005 when I announced my candidacy as a Democratic write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate against then incumbent Hillary ("The Pillory") Clinton. I decided to run against her because of her provably lack of interest in the homeless (she had refused to be the Senate
sponsor of the oft-introduced in the House Bringing American Home Act aimed at ending homelessness in America). Like her perhaps understandably wandering husband, she was involved in the coverup of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Occupied Tibet and she was knowingly and willingly in bed presumably not with any White House internst but, at least metaphorically, with the corporate elite.
In early 2005 I met for over an hour with Wrobleski in his office at the Staten
Island Borough Hall. I answered all his questions and gave him a pile of newspaper articles about me - from The New York Times, Newsday, the Daily News, the New York Post, the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin, Downtown Magazine (no longer published), the SoHo Weekly News (no longer published), Our Town, the Queens Tribune, the Yonkers Herald-Statesman, the Downtown Express, et. al. as well as te names and contact information of plenty of people, some quite prominent, in a position to comment on my political work, etc. At the end of the interview when I asked Wrobleski about coverage, he replied, "Let's see how your campaign goes." He asked me to stay in touch by phine and e-mail. As I've said before if there were an Olympic Games competition for not answering calls and e-mails Tom Wrovbleski would be a certain gold medalist.
The Wrobleski news suppression came to an end in August, 2005 when the aforementioned NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, with whom via a member of my family I've been personally acquainted since 1979, during a televised campaign debate suggested elliptically that I had been "stalking" her.
Ms. Gotbaum certainly gets nervous in my presence. Besty Gotbaum is an early Laura Broadwell. Gotbaum married ato a CIA agent and, according to a very reliable source, cuckolded the spy and had subsequently managed to keep the spy spouse and the adultery secret from the public. Some "Advocate!" Betsy Gotbaum gets uneasy in the presence of investigative journalists. As a journalist I've covered events at which she has been present. As an advocate, I had a scheduled meeting with her Chief of Staff to discuss staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers. When I showed up for the scheduled meeting she tried to have me arrested. Fortunately Str. Detective Al Fiore, the police officer from the NYPD's Intelligence Division she called to bust me, was (and is considerably more stable than the seriously paranoid Betsy Gotbaum). After a 15 minute inteview with me in the reception area of Gotbaum's Public Advocate Office, he came to the conclusion that Gotbaum's fears were baseless. He advised me to go home and leave Gotbaum alone for awhile. As far as I am concerned, Betsy Gotbaum is a political bedbug and I have no problem staying away from her.
Her fantasy that I was "stalking her" is the stuff of Freudian commentary.
When I saw an article in the Daily News containing Gotbaum's comment that she was being stalked by a homeless person - and taking into account that she had on a previous occasion contact Public Advocate Norman Siegel (whose candidacy I was supporting) to claim that I was "stalking" her - I knew she was referring to me. I called the News and within a short time I was sitting at a City Hall-area tavern with then Daily News City Hall reporter Celeste Katz and setting the record straight. I had already spoken briefly about Gotbaum's "stalker" fantasies and abiout my candidacy for the U.S. Senate with then
Newsday City Hall repoter Dan Janison. Janison's article about me vs. Gotbaum, including mention of my candidacy against Hillary Clinton, appeared in NYC Newsday on August 26, 2005. Ms. Katz essentially accurate article appeared in the Daily News as did a reported by the NY Times' Jonathan Hicks, on August 27, 2005.
And bringing up the rear was Wrobleski who got scooped by three newspapers and whose willfully error-riddled defamatory piece of journalistic
sewage appeared in the Advance on August 27 after all the other papers had hit the streets of all five boroughs and beyond.
Wrobleski then resumed his non-coverage of my U.S. Senate candidacy and fund himself exposed in UP FRONT News and in my campaign blog at
And so he had no choice and a few days after my telephone conversation with Advance Editor Dean Balsamini, who brought up one of my articles about "Wrongleski" on his computer and then bellowed into the phone, ""You trashed my reporter! You trashed my reporter!" Wrobleski called me for an interview about my campaign. His story appeared on the Advance front page on August 21, 2006 under the headline, "With the stroke of a pencil, vote for anyone." As I've suggested previously, a professor of journalism would have been generous to give Wrobleski as "C." His article devotes about 98% of its space to discussing the technicalities of running as a write-in candidate.
At the very end he mentiond my point about Mrs. Clinton's lack of interest in the poor and her lack of interest in exposing the Genocide in Tibet. Wrobleski and his political colleagues, EditorBrian Laline, Editors Tom Checchi and Dean Balsamini, reporters such as Judy Randall and Michael Sedon practice Lyndon LaRouche-style journalism and are in fact hostile to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Some months ago Viet Nam vet, S.I.human pro-democracy activist Bill Johnseon told me that Staten Island needs a good newspaper. Well now that he reads UP FRONT News, he's got one.
Honest "troublemakers" such as myself are not without allies. Dr. Mitchell was openly and quietly supportive of my human rights work, as regards patients at Queens Hospital Center or victims of oppression in Tibet.
Bill Johnsen tends to be less openly critical of the Democratic Party Machine than I am (although he recurrently confronted former Republican
Congressman Vito Fossella, a Dick Cheney pal who became even more famous as the "family values" pontificator whose druken driving arrest some years ago in Virginia led to his being exposed as a philanderer). Fossella may be a good candidate perhaps for a high position in the CIA or maybe for NYC Public Advocate.
There are other "troublemakers" who over the years have gotten positive attention in this newspaper. I'll mention several.
The late Marshall Englander was a forceful advocate for health care rights for all whom I got to know during the battle of Queens Hospital Center.
The musician/activist Rebecca Moore and I met at a New Year's Day, 2005 Poetry Marathon at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery Church. Her music was gorgeous and so was her speaking out on the rampant gentrification of the
Lower East Side. She was in no way intimidated by the politicans.
Andrew Mazzone, now the Media Representative and Economics Advisor to UP FRONT News is an economist and businessman who, along with the 19th
century activist/economist and 1886 NYC mayoral candidate Henry George, believes that the earth belongs to all human beings - and not to the monopolists. What makes Mr. Mazzone different is that in his neo-Georgist teaching, advocacy and (with me) lobbying, he's doing something about changing the world for the better.
Former NYC Councilmember and now NYS Senator Tony Avella (D.-Queens) took on Christine Quinn not only on issues such as the City Council voting itself raises but also, at my urging, introducing Resolution #1299 in 2008 calling for the removal of the 2008 Olympics from China because of the Chinese Communist Genocide in Tibet. He may have presidential qualities.
NYC Councilmember Charles Barron - who accepted my invitation to speak at a Union Square speakout no longer run by the UP FRONT News-deposed Geoffrey Blank, and who told me some truths about both Debi Rose and Lenora Fulani - and I may not agree on all issues. But he knows that I am trustworthy - and the feeling is mutual.
Troublemakers!
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