Saturday, October 30, 2010

CHARLES BARRON FOR GOVERNOR

Published by Tom Weiss UP FRONT NEWS October 26, 2010
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
http://www.upfrontnews.blogspot.com/
CHARLES BARRON FOR GOVERNOR
Tea Party siren Sarah Palin, who has been known to belittle community organizers, should be grateful that she hasn't had to face or debate Charles Barron, the New York City councilmember running for governor of New York State as the candidate of the Freedom Party.
It was late in the last millenium (I do not recall the exact year) that I had the opportunity to work with Mr. Barron to whom I had first been introduced by the Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell, the now retired pastor of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Queens and a close associate and friend of Dr. King. Mr. Barron led a community effort to battle then Governor George Pataki who had cut a deal with a politically connected company to place a potentially pollution-spewing recycling plant in East New York, Brooklyn, a neighborhood with alarmingly high asthma statistics. And what at the outset appeared to be a done deal and a case of clear environmental racism was stopped!
In his pre-City Council years Mr. Barron, who graduated from Hunter College (major in sociology, which he put to good use; minor in elemtary education) was a member of the Black Panthers and served as the Chief of Staff to Rev. Herbert Daughtry, founder of the National Black United Front. Mr. Barron has been one of the leaders in the struggle to rid his community of drug trafficking.
He was elected to the City Council in 2001 (re-elected in 2005) and became the Chairman of the Committee on Higher Education, during which time he was successful in restoring $10 million that had been cut from the budget of the City University of New York. It is his view that that there should be no tuition fees at CUNY. (Indeed tuition at the City colleges was free until the state and city governments imposed a policy of "planned shrinkage", i.e. balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, to deal with the "fiscal crisis", which generated the famous Daily News headline [President Gerald] "Ford to New York: 'Drop Dead'.")
Under the Michael Bloomberg-Christine Quinn regime, Councilman Barron has sometimes been the sole voice of protest against Council actions which use public money (taxes) for private profit. A classic example of this kind of distorted priorities was the Council's overwhelming vote (with Mr. Barron opposed) for the new Yankee Stadium, which had one component that the original iconic Stadium (which should probably have been landmarked) lacked: luxury boxes for the corporate and political elite.
Mr. Barron, often with his ally, former City Councilmember Tony Avella of Queens, has been a forceful advocate for affordable housing, a key issue in a city in which most of the housing that is built is of the luxury variety (the real estate section of the Sunday New York Times is an eye-opener) while the homeless shelters are full.
Considering the political and economic climate, it is undestandable that some people may opt not to vote at all, one way of ignoring the major parties. Some will opt to vote for a "minor" party candidate. Presumably many people, "progressives", will consider Mr. Barron or the Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins. Although there are similarities in their platforms, Mr. Barron is the better choice. While Mr. Barron is deeply dissatisfied with the makeup of the Democratic ticket (especially as Andrew Cuomo tilts to the right), he remains open to working with Democrats who demonstrate their readiness to do what is necessary to end the huge gap between the haves and have-nots. The Greens, whom I have found to be less than small "d" democratic at times, reject that approach, a principle that helped give us eight years of George W. Bush.
Mr. Barron and the Freedom Party of New York give me hope.
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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

UP FRONT News September 24, 2010
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
http://www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com/ www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum
tomsupfrontnews@yahoo.com
GETTING THE FULL STORY
Some cliches, with a bit of adjustment, are true. One such is "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer", although it may be more accurate to suggest that "the rich get richer while just about everyone else gets poorer." With the tanking of the economy into a very severe recession, the rich have for the most part been exempted from anything approaching deprivation, while the incidence of homelessness becomes increasingly widespread with the epidemic of foreclosures, layoffs, and in major cities gentrification and "rentflation." (The federal government maintains that there little inflation - thereby justifying no increases in Social Security benefits for two years - but seems to ignore the realities of millions of tenants.)
Some people on left in particular complain (understandably I believe) that corporatism so dominates the media that much news that exposes true power of huge money is suppressed. (Folks on the right complain that the media is dominated by liberals.) While there is no question that many true stories do not appear in the mainstream media, the First Amendment is not dead. And so I intend to note important stories that appear in the media that essentially document the "rich get richer" reality - among other truisms.
On August 23 of this year The New York Times ran a story headlined "23 Million Possible Reasons For Chief to Leave Her Bank." The article was about a severance package of $23 million that would be awarded to Peyton Patterson, if and when she leaves her position as chief executive of NewAlliance Bancshares. Compare that to a typical severance payment of a retiring worker. In fact the $23 million package pales in comparison to more extravagant "golden parachutes" (and bonuses awarded to people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs bank).
The Times also ran a story last August 3 headlined "After 99 weeks, Only Desperation" focusing on the very real tribulations of Ms. Alexandra Jarrin, who was laid off and now finds herself totally incomeless as her 99 weeks of unemplyment benefits expire.
A friend told me about an online news service "Legitgov.com" which posts articles from around the world that may never reach people who rely on one or two news sources, if any.
Even the New York Post ran a story, first appearing in the Guardian in Great Britain reporting that it was the quartermaster at the wheel's error that resulted in the sinking of the Titanic almost 100 years ago. According to the story, the Quartermaster misunderstood a direction to steer to the right, instead turning left and straight into an iceberg. The informant, (highest ranking survivor of the disaster), revealed that he withheld that information from investigators because he "feared that it would bankrupt the White Star Line."
Sometimes it can take many years for a full story to come out.
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THE PROBLEM IS NOT THE MARGINALLY QUALIFIED CAROLINE KENNEDY AS U.S. SENATOR. IT IS THE TOTALLY UNQUALIFIED HILLARY CLINTON AS SECRETARY OF STATE.

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been in telephone contact with Gov. David Paterson via several high level aides and I expect to be sending him the facts on Hillary Clinton by e-mail very soon. Under any circumstances, assuming that the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations does a rush job and approves Obama's nomination of Mrs. Clinton to be Secretary of State, as the facts about her become known, her tenure may be abbreviated. And then, if Caroline Kennedy is already a U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton will be out of a job. Sort of like Bernie Madoff.
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Saturday, December 13, 2008

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

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think perhaps Councilman Avella and/or Senator Perkins would be better choices.
In any event, Hillary Clinton is a corporation-loyal enemy of human rights (including mine), an apologist for genocide and is fundamentally unqualified to be Secretary of State.
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STRENGTHENING TENANTS RIGHTS IN NEW YORK. RESURRECT "FLYNN-DEARIE."

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, November 22, 2008

HILLARY CLINTON IS UNFIT TO BE SECRETARY OF STATE.

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE RETURN OF "PLANNED SHRINKAGE" AND DOMESTIC GENOCIDE.

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOY RYDER OF STATEN ISLAND

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, November 08, 2008

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

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

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

By Tom Weiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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