JULY 14, 2005
A statement issued by Michael Ognibene, Chief of Staff of the NYC Dept. of Youth and Community Development, clarifies the DYCH's June 13 determination that the All Stars Project, a charity controlled by Independence Party leaders Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani, is eligible for a $216,000 grant to run an afterschool program for city youth of "mixed" grade levels (high school, middle school, and primary school).
"All Stars Project, Inc., " Ognibene writes, "submitted a proposal under the Out-of-School Time (OST) RFP in Service Option II, the OST Public/Private Match Programs." Translation: "RFP" means Request for Proposals. As to Service Option II, this is a type of program where proposers must provide cash matches of at least 30 percent from private corporations, foundations and individuals (we'll be reporting soon on which "useful idiots" provided the matching funds for self-styled "Marxist-Leninist revolutionary" Fred and self-professed "post-modern Bolshevik" Leninora).
Ognibene tells us that All Stars did not participate in the competitive proposal process that resulted in determinations of eligibility for 114 out of 200 proposals. Instead its proposal was one of an additional 113 that DYCD deemed eligible because they fit into the agency's plans to achieve a balanced distribution of services by geographic area and grade levels, and for other reasons. All proposals were "reviewed and rated by a 21-member Reader Evaluation Committee."
The DYCD determined that All Stars was eligible for a a three-year grant: $72,000 a year from Sept. 1, 2005 to August 31, 2008. Let's factor this in with the entirely of mayor-to-cult largesse since 2001: the $8.7 million IDA bond for All Stars in 2002, the $7.5 million the mayor spent in 2003 to back the Independence Party's unsuccessful crusade to ban party primaries in New York City, the $50,000 to the Castillo Center to boost Fred Newman's career as a playwright, the $30,000 to the Independence Party to back Bloomberg's 2001 campaign, the $250,000 to the IP in 2004 for party building, and the $1 million raised by All Stars at its annual Lincoln Center gala this year (since the mayor appeared on the stage with Fulani to provide credibility, we can attribute this final amount to him in lieu of all the probable donations from his pocket that are NOT on the public record). Thus, we come up with a grand total of $17,746,000. How much more will the Newman-Fulani operation cadge from the mayor before we finally succeed in deprogramming the poor fellow?
The boiler plate on the DYCB's web site makes for amusing reading in light of the impending All Stars grant. We are told that the city is aiming to "expand quality OST services to support young people and their families." Support young people? In the Newman cult it's the other way around--the young people support Newman by raising money on the street and by serving as poster kids in rap performances before audiences sprinkled with wealthy white liberal donors; then, if they are so unlucky as to deemed worthy of recruitment, they may end up supporting Newman as full-time members of his "development community"--living on stipends and turning the rest of their earnings over to the stone-faced "cadre" who enforce Newman's will.
Supporting their families? Isn't the grantee in the instant case the same cult that declared in the 1980s that the "bourgeois family" was as bad as apartheid and nuclear war, and should be destroyed? And isn't this the same group that exerts itself through social therapy to recruit both kids and parents into Newman's "friendosexual" community--the institution that supposedly will replace the family? (If you think I'lm exaggerating their beliefs and aims, just read social therapist Christine LaCerva's poisonous little chapter in Sexuality and the Curriculum: The Politics and Practices of Sexuality Education, ed. John T. Sears, New York: Teachers College Press, 1992, in which she describes just how the process worked at the cult's now defunct Barbara Taylor School in the 1980s and 1990s.)
Also according to the DYCD web site, the city's OST programs aim at providing "free, safe programs in a supportive environment." (In the case of All Stars one might say the environment is free, until the cult starts making demands on you; safe, if you happen to be genetically immune to cultic recruitment tactics; and supportive...if you get with the program.) Another aim of the city's OST programs is to provide "trained staff, familiar with the strengths and needs of young people." Yes, All Stars has a "staff"--all of it trained by Fred Newman and other social therapists in principles regarded as beyond the pale by legitimate psychologists (for instance, the Newmanite principle that sex between patient and therapist and the recrutiment of the patient into Newman's revolutionary underground organization are part of the growth process). And yes, Newmanite recruiters know a lot from experience about the strengths and "needs" (read: weaknesses) of teenagers, which helps them in determining which teens to recruit and what buttons to push duiring the process. (Read Newman's "Women I Live With" in Practice, Winter 1990, in which he describes how, in the early 1970s, he used his knowledge of the strengths and "needs" of a 16-year-old runaway girl--who had come to his psychotherapy clinic for help--to turn her into a full-time political follower of his revolutionary genius-ego. Then read her response in the same issue of the Newmanite magazine (after being in the cult for 18 years) in which she gives the ritual phrases of worship towards Fred and his number-one harem woman: "Fred and Rie: Thank you--for leading us in this difficult, passionate, sexy process of learning how to touch you and be touched, want you and be wanted, want the revolution and be wanted by it.")
Anyone who wants to complain to the city directly about the All Stars grant can e-mail the mayor at http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html. But don't be too hard on hizzoner; he's just following orders...from Fred Newman.
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