December 20, 2005
The NY Post
reports that the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club - the organization from which Air America Radio received a "startup loan" of $875,000 and which has (apparently) been paid back months and months later - is being evicted from Co-op City in the Bronx:
"There was a time when they provided services for senior citizens, the frail and for youth," said Herbert Freedman, chief officer of Co-op City's management firm, Riverbay Corp. "Now it looks like it's for profit, since they charge $400 to $500 a month for day-care services. That's not why they were given the space."
You'll recall that Air America Radio executive David Goodfriend (a former official in the Clinton White House) said that the former head of Wise, Charles Rosen, approved the loan:
Fmr. Air America exec "sickened" by loan; "fraudulent conveyance". If that's not bad enough, there's some completely uncorroborated claims about Rosen
here. That appears to be based on a 9/5/05 NY Post
piece:
[Rosen] was known as "the Lenin of the North Bronx" while he led Co-op City's legendary rent strike.
Charles Rosen was booted from the top post at the Bronx-based Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in June 2005 after the city yanked $9.7 million of the agency's contracts and launched an investigation into the group's finances, including the loans.
Rosen, who engineered the loan to the radio network as it desperately sought cash to start up during the 2004 presidential campaign, is no stranger to leftist causes. Only this time, he used taxpayer money to promote a political agenda.
Once a printer for The Post, Rosen had belonged to the Communist Progressive Labor Party by the time he took the helm of the nation's largest rent strike during a 13-month standoff at Co-op City that ended in 1976.
Also in 1976, he wore a wire for Charles Hynes, then a special state prosecutor who investigated Rosen's claim that Assemblyman Alan Hochberg tried to bribe him with offers of a job and cash in order to keep Rosen from running against him.
Hochberg was convicted and sent to jail, while Rosen, with no more than a high-school diploma, was left to run the largest cooperative-apartment complex in the country, with about 50,000 residents.
Published reports......identified Rosen as coming from a family of Polish and Russian revolutionaries and said he claimed not to believe in electoral politics...
And, from
this:
The chairman was New York Post printer Charles Rosen, who became a neighborhood "folk hero". Called "the Lenin of the North Bronx", Rosen was "a child of the old left whose Socialist politics [had] never been a secret in Co-Op City." [Jack Newfield How Profiteering and Patronage Helped Create Co-Op Citys Crisis" Village Voice November 24, 1975; Vivian Gornick "Can the Rent Strikers Beat the Establishment at Co-Op Cty?" The Village Voice November 24, 1975] Jack Newfield writing for the Village Voice in November, 1975, reported
One night I attended a tenants meeting in C-op City. Six hundred people packed a cinder-blocked basement community room. Most of the people in the room were in their sixties and seventies; neat, gray-haired, bespectacled; people who had worked all their lives and grown timid under the authority of near-poverty. Charlie Rosen walked into the room. Suddenly, hundreds of these people were on their feet shouting, applauding, raising their fists in the power sign, their eyes shining behind their union-discount glasses. [Jack Newfield How Profiteering and Patronage Helped Create Co-Op Citys Crisis" Village Voice November 24, 1975]
Here's a fun task: draw all the links and connections between Rosen, AAR, the Clintons, etc. etc. Just be sure and stock up on pens first.
Posted in Meta
at December 20, 2005 12:25 PM
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