EDITOR’S NOTE: The site does not condone the use of Mr. Ward’s information for harassment purposes, only for legitimate professional complaints about his “charity”‘s issues.
As many people know the recalls of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch are officially underway. These, combined with the wins in Ohio, will set an example across the country of what the people will and will not tolerate. The recalls officially started on November 15th. We have sixty days to collect 540,000 legitimate signatures for the recalls of both Walker and Kleefisch. In any recall, regardless of how it is run or how well everyone is trained, there will be a certain number of invalid signatures (felons on papers, duplicates, etc.) so the number we are shooting for is 700,000+. The recall, at this point, is a collaborative of different recall organizations, one of which is Defending Wisconsin PAC, of which I am Executive Director. First week signature numbers seemed to be around 200,000. It is hard to walk in Downtown Madison without seeing a dozen recall volunteers. It is safe to say that, much like in February, Wisconsin is showing the nation how Democracy works. The stakes are as high as can be, a loss here could set the entire country back over a century and cripple us all.
So what do people do when they are used to having control over everything and they see that control slipping? They cheat, that is what they are good at. Realizing that this was democracy in action and the people were about to take control, again, the GOP faithful, the few who still stand by and swear allegiance to Scott Walker, concocted a plan to try to derail the recalls. It started with complaining about how much it cost. Keep in mind this is the same party that ran fake Democrats in the previous recalls just to force an extra election. The majority of people saw this as hypocritical, as it was. Only the select few still use this argument and pretend it is valid. The will of the people should not have a price at which it no longer becomes worth finding out. If someone gets elected and goes against what they were elected to do, the people should be able to legally remove them. They are supposed to serve us and we must remember this.
They then created a page and a campaign to encourage the burning of recall petitions. I will note, although I only take it at face value, I have to be fair and say that both the Republican and Tea Party of Wisconsin have denied any involvement in this. One thing is for certain, the Facebook page titled “Operation Burn Notice” in which they encourage and talk about burning recall petitions or not turning them in, was not created by someone opposed to Scott Walker.
These stories all broke last week, but today we have a new development. It started a few days ago when a new site went live. This site was http://occupy-madison.com/ (on a side note the right seems to love creating sites, they created a hate site for me personally with a music video and video game at www.segwayboy.com). The official site for Occupy Madison is http://occupy-madison.org. But this teaches us all a valuable lesson. When registering occupy web pages be sure to register the .org, .com, and .net. It is not very expensive and you only need to host one of them, you can forward the rest. If you follow the donation button on the original site, it takes you to a donation page for an organization called Occupy, Inc, a fake right-wing company run by John C. Ward and located at 7725 NW 192nd Street in Edmond Oklahoma. This is registered as a 501 (c) (3) tax exempt organization with a listed phone number of 405-341-9086. So why is this so important? Because today this web site made a post with the direct intent on interfering with the recalls. The post said that the DPW (Democratic Party of Wisconsin) and United Wisconsin, two of the many recall organizations, announced we had enough signatures to recall both Scott Walker and Rebecca Kleefisch. It said that no more petitions would be collected and people should just dispose of any remaining petitions. This would seem like wonderful news, but it’s fake.
As the Executive Director of one of the official recall organizations, I can assure you the recall is not over. As for Mr. John C. Ward. He is anti-American and should be charged with a felony. The post and site seem to have been taken down, but I am sure many have gotten screenshots. I say he is anti-American and has committed treason upon our country. What he did was illegal. Despite the disclaimer (not on the actual post) saying it was a fake site, he still attempted to interfere with the recall election. Most people will not look for the disclaimer. This was figured out pretty quickly, but he may have succeeded in convincing many people to dispose of their petitions. To tamper with a Democratic process and the elections process is treason upon our country. He conspired to have many people destroy their recall petitions. By this, he would be guilty of something along the lines of conspiracy to tamper with elections. Thankfully for all, this is Wisconsin. You can try every dirty trick in the book to bring us down but we will keep coming back and we will succeed. In the meantime, I want people to know that if anyone ever says that you should destroy petitions (even when we do have the signatures we need), do not trust them. Every organization involved in the recall knows that every signature beyond the number needed still helps and deserves to count. Never, in any circumstance, would anyone legitimate suggest destruction of petitions. Period. Please share this article so people know what is going on. SOLIDARITY!!
Jeremy Ryan
Executive Director
Defending Wisconsin PAC
jryan@defendingwisconsin.org
[Editor's Note: Donations made through this post go to the author, not the website]
Note: Segway Jeremy Ryan has become a full-time member of the protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Formerly a businessman, he gave up his business to join the fight for the middle class in the State of Wisconsin. Through videos and writings he has informed hundreds of thousands of people about what was going on at the Wisconsin State Capitol once the mainstream media had mostly abandoned the protests. His full-time activism is completely funded by the people. If you would like to help out please click here.
Prove that this is actually connected to the Wisconsin GOP and I might take this seriously.
Right, like they would be dumb enough to claim a guy that would do that. One thing is certain, it sure as hell wasn’t a Democrat….
I always make sure to click through a few layers before I share things. I hope I’m wrong here but….
“This website was registered by a company called Occupy, Inc, a fake right-wing company run by John C. Ward and located at 7725 NW 192nd Street in Edmond Oklahoma. This is registered as a 501 (c) (3) tax exempt organization with a listed phone number of 405-341-9086.”
What am I missing here? Please tell me I’m wrong :/
http://dawhois.com/domain/godaddy.com.html
___________________________________________________
OCCUPY-MADISON.COM – Whois Information.
Please note: the registrant of the domain name is specified.
in the “registrant” field. In most cases, GoDaddy.com, Inc.
is not the registrant of domain names listed in this database.
Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com/)
Domain Name: OCCUPY-MADISON.COM.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS41.DOMAINCONTROL.COM.
NS42.DOMAINCONTROL.COM.
___________________________________________________
I do apologize I wasn’t as specific as I should have been. The site IS registered private and it has no identifying information, true. But click on the donate link. All donations go to Occupy Inc. This serves as the only identification on the site and shows that Occupy Inc is in some way related to the site. Here is a cache of the site since it is now down. Go ahead, click on the donate button and see where the donations go. To Occupy Inc.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=occupy-madison.com+recall&d=27023071961614274&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=fe514b0c,e79e4ad1
Ok, but yeah, be careful cause you said the site “was registered to…” that is pretty specific language. However, you are correct, the donate button does indeed point to a justgive.org account in the name of Occupy, Inc. and John C.Ward of Oklahoma (you should get some screen shots of this before the cache goes away). But knowing how things often play out, I have a feeling there are two things going on here. His ‘grandson’ states to contact him with any questions. Maybe we should do just that? Actually, I’m gonna just reply to his post. This just really bugs me either way.
I have been in contact with both his son and attorney. They claim he has nothing to do with it but refuse to find out who does. I explained how the only identifying info on the entire site points to John C Ward and Occupy Inc. I told them if they did not create the site and don’t condone the use of their link on the site then they should be able to get whoever did register it from Godaddy. I offered a full retraction and apology in the case that it was no one in any way linked to John C Ward. They got a little less friendly at that point so although his grandson may be telling the truth, it is likely someone closely related and he likely knows about it. Based on what evidence we do have (the donate link), a reasonable person would assume that John C Ward was associated with the fake site so the story still stands.
Like I said, I thinks there are 2 things going on here. It only costs a few extra bucks to register your domain anon. through godaddy. However, the registrant of this site actually enlisted the services of a company specializing in anonymous domain registration (I checked their website out) domainbyproxy.com which probably costs a little more and displays a cunning resevred typically for those in the know; like political operatives. I can totallly still see Mr. Ward having no clue what is going on or shall I say what he got himself into. Something don’t smell right. Either way democracy was sabataged in a most despicable way and I don’t understand how, given the irrefutable proof of THAT, someone isn’t being arrested :/
As I recall, domainsbyproxy.com is who you get if you pay go daddy.com the extra few $ to get the anon registration, or it was a few years ago.
I’m sorry, I should have said “great article,Segway” . . .
Great article, Alyssa . . . I spent a month of weekends in WI last year, and wouldn’t doubt any dastardly deed. This is probably the lowest, though . . . glad you were willing to crawl in the sewer to find it!
A cached version of the fake page exists in the Bing search engine cache: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=occupy-madison.com+recall&d=27023071961614274&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=fe514b0c,e79e4ad1
Also, a screenshot is available in the link preview window when doing a google search:
http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2076/occupymadisonscreenshot.png
It’s pretty disgusting the lengths the right-wing will go to to corrupt the tenets of the Constitution and the rights of the people.
Hi, my name is James. I am John Ward’s grandson. He has been receiving calls and threats because of these posts and called me because he didn’t understand what was going on.
Occupy Inc. is a ministry. John Ward is a small town pastor who lives out in a rural community. He is in NO WAY affiliated with the occupy-madison.com website and doesn’t even know what it is. He doesn’t even have a working internet connection at his home and has never been to the state of Wisconsin.
All this information is completely false and he and my Grandma, who barely even understand what the internet is, are getting horrible calls. They called me and I had to do research to even figure out what was going on.
PLEASE REMOVE this information from your website and do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Executive Director of one of the official recall organizations? How involved are you in the planning and strategy of the recall? How many signatures have you collected, Jeremy? You are full of crap. You love the spotlight but don’t do any of the actual work.
I first read about the recall tampering on MotherJones.com (http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/conservative-sabotage-recall-walker-wisconsin) which featured screen shots from a Facebook page of an apparent member of the Kenosha school district who aspired to deliberately ‘burn and shred’ recall petitions. I immediately contacted the Kenosha School Board and emailed their president urging them to investigate. The president did get back to me and assured they would be investigating the incident and reviewing the connections between alleged school district employees and this criminal attempt to thwart a democratic recall effort. Hopefully the efforts of those opposing the recall will fail and their illegal criminal activity will be punished. Please update on this article if you receive any more information! Thank you!
Nicely done, Alyssa. Too few people report when things like this happen. They just stand idly by and say, “It’s somebody else’s problem; they’ll do it.” Good for you for going straight to the top. If more Americans behave the way you do, we might make some progress in this country. : )
~Jessy