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.
*******

"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.
* * * * * * *

ENDGAME FOR BETSY GOTBAUM, THE REAL REASONS.

UP FRONT News November 7, 2008
Published by Tom Weiss
Editorial Advisor: Willard Whittingham
"The paper that can't be bought and can't be sold."
www.tomsupfrontnews.blogspot.com
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/UPFRONTNewsdiscussionforum

ENDGAME FOR BETSY GOTBAUM, THE REAL REASONS. THE NEW YORK TIMES SCRATCHES THE SURFACE OF A DISHONEST, CIA-LINKED
AND PARANOID PUBLIC OFFICIAL.

By Tom Weiss

I first met Betsy Gotbaum at my Aunt Dolly Perutz' funeral in 1979, well before she became the NYC Public Advocate. It was then that I learned that Betsy had, since childhood, been a close friend of the Perutzes. My mother's older surviving brother was Tino Perutz, although her oldest brother, Ladi, was killed fighting for the Germany-allied Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. Betsy and the Perutz' daughter Kathy, my cousin, became the closest of friends.

Although I became acquainted with Betsy Gotbaum at the funeral I kept a political distance because her husband Victor, was the very powerful head of District Council 37, the municipal workers union. I had been very publicly human rights-violated by Ed Koch when, as a social worker, elected union shop steward and elected member of the Queens Hospital Center Community Advisory Board, I had blown the whistle on the coverup of budget cut-caused patient deaths at City-operated QHC. I was put through a Soviet Union style psychiatric evaluation trip, arrested and fired for exposing not only de facto genocide at the hospital but also often racist abuse of psychiatric patients there.

The Union, which went through the motions of representing me, was not much help. That may have had everything to do with the fact that I was among the union dissidents who objected to the very autocratic Victor Gotbaum's de facto alliances at worker expense with people like the extraordinarily anti-poor and corrupt Ed Koch.

It cost me my job and years of blacklisting. With some help from the NYS Health Department (which investigated and "substantiated" my claims), some doctors, the civil rights leader and Martin Luther King associate Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell and a few courageous politicians such as then City Councilmember Mary Codd from Staten Island (things have gotten worse politically in S.I. and beyond since her departure), and with major broadcast and print media coverage (including a front page coverage of me in the March 1, 1978 of the Queens Edition of Newsday) I got QHC the money it needed to hire enough nurses that had been let go to satisfy the demands of the bankers and their politicians.

My post-Perutz funeral contacts with Betsy Gotbaum were rare although my contacts with the Perutz family have continued through the years. Kathy Perutz is a very well known writer who has counted people like Norman Mailer as very close friends. She has done major human rights work, e.g. in the prisons.

Betsy Gotbaum and I became re-acquainted at a 2001 Public Advocate candidates forum on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. After the debate (Norman Siegel was the best debater), I went over to Ms. Gotbaum, who took a few seconds before she recognized me and became effusively friendly. We talked about family and some politics for several minutes and she gave me a bunch of inside personal telephone numbers including her office number at the Museum of Natural History, of which she was CEO. She literally urged me to call her "anytime." She had also been the NYC Parks Commissioner. This lady is not only very rich, she is very connected.

I waited for some weeks and then called her at the Museum. No response - and then some serious security guard hostility when I stopped in at the Museum. She did once call me as, accorcding to her, she was on her way to the airport for a vacation in the Dominican Republic. Despite her assurances, I never heard from her again.

Some years later, having experienced staff abuse of homeless people in shelters and drop-in centers, encouraged by my late Rabbi Harold Swiss, who was personally acquainted with by now NYC Public Advocate Gotbaum, I arranged an appointment at her Municipal Building office with her Chief of Staff Scott Coccaro to discuss the homeless abuse problem.

I got there on time. As I arrived, Ms. Gotbaum was leaving. She said, "Hi, Tom" and left. Perhaps a half hour after the scheduled appointment time, I was approached in the reception area by two men. They introduced themselves as police officers. The name I easily remember is Sgt. Al Fiore. He told me that Ms. Gotbaum had complained that I had made a "threat" against Linda Gibbs, who at the time was the Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services. In fact the NYCDHS had covered up the staff abuse matter and done other Giulianiesque things harmful to the homeless and I had criticized Gibbs in UP FRONT News.

I of course had never made a "threat" against Gibbs, although I acknowledged that Ms. Gibbs, like Gotbaum, might feel threatened by UP FRONT News. I explained all that to Sgt. Fiore and his partner. Very fortunately Sgt. Fiore did not only play the role of "good cop", he is a good cop. It took him perhaps 15 minutes of questioning me to realize that Gotbaum's claims as regards a "threat" by me were nonsense. He told me to go home and leave Betsy Gotbaum alone for awhile. I most certainly did. Paranoid people, especially those in high public office, can be very dangerous.

Realizing that Betsy Gotbaum was ill-suited to be Public Advocate, I supported Norman Siegel. One day as I was doing some volunteer work for Mr.Siegel, he asked to speak with me. He told me that he had received a complaint from Gotbaum that I had been "stalking" her. I told him about my personal relationship with her and her attempt to have me arrested. I told him that I have never stalked anyone and told him that, as a journalist, I've sometimes been at event she is at. I also told him that, following Gotbaum's (no doubt Tom Weiss UP FRONT News-related) sudden termination of what had been a 40 year friendship with my cousin Kathy, I had learned that among the skeletons in the Gotbaum political closet was a past and unsuccessful marriage to a CIA agent. (As far as I am concerned, if Ms. Gotbaum has an attraction for spies, that is her right; it is not her right to keep a marriage to a government spy a secret.) I also learned that things did not work out with the agent and that Gotbaum ended up in an adulterous affair with someone else. Some of what the New York Post would probably describe as "steamy" trysts took place at the Perutz home in a very wealthy section of Great Neck, Long Island.

Norman Siegel, who, for all his solid civil rights credentials, has been known to to accept political support from some loser types like the Howard Deaniac and "liberal" autocrat Tracy Denton (who also once tried to have me arrested, paranoia in the Manhattan liberal establishment being a contagious ailment). The serious conflict of interest of a spy-connected Public Advocate went unmentioned in Siegel's campaign and he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, something that happens to almost candidate who utilizes the services of a fraud like Tracy Denton.

Betsy Gotbaum, her paranoia apparently not treated psychiatrically, made things far worse when in a televised campaign debate she refused her opponents' (including Mr. Siegel) request that she disclose her appointment schedule (which, going back some time, would include me). She explained her refusal by claiming that she was being "stalked" by a homeless person.

When I saw that comment in the Daily News, I knew she was referring to me and so I called the paper and within a matter of a couple of hours I was sitting at the Raccoon Lodge tavern in Tribeca with the News City Hall reporter Celeste Katz and a News photographer. Although my picture did not get into the August 27, 2005 article. Ms. Katz' story was essentially accurate. I am glad that she mentioned my "Free Tibet" shirt and she quoted me accurately when I said that Gotbaum was a fraud and that she should quit. The Daily News, however, neglected to mention the fact that I was also a candidate for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton.

My candidacy however was not ignored by Newsday's City Hall reporter Dan Janison, whose story on the Gotbaum vs. Weiss dispute came out in NYC Newsday on August 26., 2005.

My side of the story was also reported by Jonathan Hicks in The New York Times on August 27, 2005.

Bringing up the rear was none other than the censorship prince of New York journalism, Tom Wrobleski of the Staten Island Advance. Apparently within moments of having been scooped by Newsday Wrobleski, who had been suppressing the news of my U.S. Senate candidacy for months, called me for an "exclusive." We did a brief telephone interview. The billionaire Donald Newhouse-owned Staten Island Advance should consider itself fortunate that I didn't sue the paper for libel. His front page lead story was riddled with errors printed as fact and contained defamatory comments about me by State Senator Diane Savino (who still employs as her Chief of Staff a violence-prone character named Robert Cataldo). It contained similar remarks by a fundamentally inept and negligent Albany hack named Keith Parascandola, who worked as Chief of Staff for the late Assemblyman John Lavelle and and then his really bad successor Matthew Titone, also known as the ambassador to Staten Island from the Empire of Christine Quinn. As far as I am concerned, Parascandola could have done well as the Chief of Staff for Caligula.

Tom Wrobleski, who exists to cover up corruption in S.I. (e.g. Fossella, Titone, et. al.) racist genocide (e.g. in Tibet), politics (e.g. my candidacies for the U.S. Senate and more recently for the U.S. House of Representatives, domestic fascism e.g. Lyndon LaRouche) is a major reason why the Staten Island Advance has been properly characterized as "the most racist paper in New York."

Fernanda Santos, a free lance journalist writing for The New York Times wrote a story appearing in The Times under the headline, "Betsy Gotbaum Says She Will Not Seek Re-election as the City's Public Advocate." Gotbaum's stated reasons as reported in The Times are as phony as she has been for decades. She talks about her opposition to Bloomberg's third term plans. (I can understand her not wanting to be tarred with Bloomberg's wish to become emperor to Quinn's empress.) Gotbaum mentions the highly publicized death last year of her step-daughter-in-law Carol Anne Gotbaum, who was arrested in a reportedly seriously intoxicated state at the Phoenix airport while on a stopover to a rehab facility. Carol Anne was detained, and left unattended while shackled to a fixture in a holding area where she accidentally asphyxiated herself in an attempt to escape. Reports suggest that Carol Anne had a long psychiatric and substance abuse history. Perhaps Betsy Gotbuam, who lost legal actions against the Phoenix authorities, would like to explain why the apparently acutely psychologically afflicted Carol Anne was traveling alone thousands of miles away from home.

Gotbaum, who willfully has covered up staff abuse of homeless people in drop-in centers and shelters, depicts herself in The Times article as an advocate fore the poor and as "the rebel." Yeesh! She is all about money, power and deception! Shades of the pseudo-"mavericks" John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Well after I reported the Gotbaum/CIA connection in UP FRONT News, the Times' Hicks reported it in a 2005 story about Gotbaum. Hicks, however, committed a Village Voice-style journalistic ethical no-no, when he failed to write that the Gotbaum/CIA story has been first reported in UP FRONT News.

The real reason that the paranoid but deeply ambitious Gotbaum - who has fantasized about running for mayor (Sarah Palin would do better in an election here) - is not running again is because of exposure in UP FRONT News.

The New York Times, although way ahead of the steadily "retreating" Staten Island Advance, has scratched the surface of the very impaired and potentially destructive (Gotbaum has still not made her telephone apology to me via UP FRONT News Editorial Advisor Willard Whittingham about the "stalker" defamation public) Betsy Gotbaum.

And as far as "stalking" Betsy Gotbaum is concerned, I refer the reader again to the compelling country song by Dwight Yoakum, "I Ain't That Lonely Yet."
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