Organized crime style harassment levelled against Cindy Sheehan

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Original post here:

The past few weeks have been a little strange at Cindy for Congress and, I guess the things that have been happening could just be coincidences, or a run of bad luck, but the climate for the possibility of campaign hanky-panky certainly exists.

Campaigns have been compromised since the beginning of campaign history, but these days with legal warrantless wiretapping and political party conventions sponsored by AT&T and the constant call of “all hail to my political party” and obeisance to the banksters above what’s good for our nation, maybe what’s been happening on my campaign isn’t coincidental or “Mercury retrograde,” or whatever.

Starting with the necessity of “changing a light bulb” (bugging my phone) in my hotel phone at the DNC (brought to you by AT&T) while I was out of the room, Cindy for Congress has had an increasing number of attacks. Two weeks ago, we were begged by organizers of a “radical” music festival called “We the People(Sheeple)” forbade me from speaking after having begged me to be there. An article in LA Beat said that the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigoso was involved in the decision to silence my voice. Not only did we go down to L.A. at our own expense, but also we took an entire day of valuable campaign time to do so.

The past week, though, has been incredibly trying. First of all we had to file a restraining order against a former volunteer whom, with hindsight, we now know was probably spying on us for the Pelosi camp. After we let this person go, his emails to us became increasingly hostile and threatening. After that happened, the tail lights in our campaign-mobile were busted out (the campaign mobile that has Cindy for Congress signs all over it and pictures of it were in an AP story.

Towards the end of the week, four young men walked into our office and they were acting quite suspiciously as they pretended to be registering to vote. One of our interns was helping them when I heard her yell: “No! Stop!” I heard an awful noise and ran out of my office to see the young men run off. They had grabbed one of our computers (leaving a jar of donations on the front desk) and beat our intern over the head when she tried to stop them. Our front windows are almost totally covered with signs and posters and it would be hard to see what we have from the street…we did, thankfully, recover the computer which has sensitive material on it and we are even more thankful that Somer is okay. (She’s tough like her boss).

After several days of harassment, I got home late one night to discover a jury summons in my mailbox. I have been summoned to jury duty the week of, you guessed it, the elections!

The final (and in my opinion worse) weird thing happened on Saturday night. We had scheduled a group of “robo” calls to go out today (Monday, Oct 13). At 10:30 Saturday night, we started getting phone calls and emails blasting us for sending out the calls at 10:30 on a Saturday night, which is not only illegal, but extremely annoying. The company had approached us to donate 10,000 calls to us and then was charging us a small fee for the rest of the calls. 38,000 early/absentee voters received this call and my office has been overwhelmed with angry voters who won’t be voting for me now and some of the good will that we have been building here in San Francisco for the last year went down the drain in just a few minutes. Was it just a “glitch” in the system, as the owner of the robo-call company claims, or overt sabotage of the campaign? Isn’t it sad that we have to be paranoid about all of this? To be sure, our office is in a rough part of town, but the frequency of the harassment is certainly intensifying.

The stakes are high and I have a feeling “they” won’t stop at anything to assure that the tyranny of incumbency continues.

I wrote back to Cindy recommending that she install CCTV security systems to ward both her home and her main office.

The robo call company is counting on a lack of cooperation from the telecommunications agency that would have to provide ANI calling records in order for Cindy to either prosecute or sue. Nevertheless, I have urged her to consult a lawyer, as it remains an actionable fact that she did not get what she paid for from that company.

It is also entirely possible that the harassment perpetrated by that company is lower level than it first appears, since it costs the company nothing to make calls pretending to be Cindy’s voter base – calls Cindy herself may have paid for – in order to create the illusion that 38,000 voters were called. It also technically does not break the law, and the burden of proof that the law was broken then remains on Cindy’s campaign. I have made her aware of this. Keeping the scale of harassment small while pretending it’s larger than it is is a hallmark of the type of harassment I too have experienced over the past 14 years, and it’s not like I haven’t learned anything about the way people like this operate over that time.

Cindy’s story reminds me of a movie I saw when I was a kid: “The Black Hand”, which among other things told the story of how organized criminals tried to extort and intimidate Enrico Caruso. I remember my entire Italian family sitting all the kids down in front of the TV in my grandfather’s row house on Bay 96th Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to watch this movie. “You pay attention to this movie, Eileen. It’s very important!”, intoned my grandmother, whose maiden name was DiNapoli and whose heavily accented delivery was a female version of Marlon Brando’s “Godfather”. My father agreed.

Even to little ADHD me, something was clearly up with this. I found it very significant that ALL the adults seemed to think it was very important that the kids watch this movie – usually they would plunk us in front of the thing to watch “Wild Kingdom” or some such while they all played “31” in the dining room, but on this occasion they were all absolutely riveted to the television, so it clearly was something very important to them. So despite the fact that much of the meaning and detail flew right over my head at age five, I did my best to pay attention too.

The scene that stayed with me over the years, playing out in even-by-then hokey black and white, was Enrico Caruso’s birthday. Flanked by the weeping women of his family and the police, he was made to dip his beautifully wrapped birthday presents one by one into a tub of water and hold them there for ten minutes. Sure enough, one of them was a bomb.

This has become our America. Our country is run by a gang of organized criminals. Yesterday’s Mafiosi birthday present is today’s financial “bailout” package, today’s hacked voting machine, today’s irradiated food, today’s Aspartame, today’s war on the poor and the middle class, today’s “no child left behind”, today’s “war on terror”, today’s “death by spreadsheet”. The fundamental trust that holds our society together is being betrayed on so many levels and in so many ways by those in power that it’s almost as if a civil war has ALREADY broken out in the United States.

It is up to Cindy Sheehan and courageous Americans like her to take our country back from these soulless criminals.

If you are in a position to do so, I hope you will consider contributing to Cindy Sheehan’s campaign, buying something from her store, and/or giving her your vote when the time comes. I make this request not as a member of CodePink or Veterans for Peace, but as an individual who believes in Cindy’s cause. She’s doing the right thing, and if enough of us join her and help her, we CAN beat this. YES, WE CAN.