AMERICA'S MARTINET: The DANGEROUS Candidacy of Rudy Giuliani
The mass media sometimes calls him "America's mayor." Critics label him a
dangerous fascist. Whether he's the alleged hero who "took charge" on
September 11, 2001, or the frightening face of a new American Reich, it
appears Rudolph Giuliani will carry George W. Bush's torch into the 2008
presidential election.
When Giuliani emerged from the dust of the World Trade Center the national
media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image of a
"hero" over reality, quickly forgetting Giuliani's dismal tenure in office
and his sorry performance on the morning of 9/11.
Before picking up the "hero" moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in
the city he governed as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug.
These
accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former New
York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
why the First Amendment is so im****tant." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
American freedom twenty-seven times!
Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case
of
Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator
and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police state.
Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not by
street
cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying his art at
political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All were false
arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.
In a similar fa****on and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only
good
thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response to
criticism thus often proves it was highly justified.
According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post,
now
New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
the citizenry and its op****tunities to speak out and be heard."
Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from
Giuliani's
totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would improve the
"quality of life" in New York by puni****ng trivial violations such as
jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and panhandling, and
even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent expressions of free
speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to
jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front stoops - the New York
City
equivalent of hanging out on the ****ch. Marijuana possession arrests
increased by well over 4,000 percent. Arrests were even made for such
things as riding a bike without a bell on it and sitting on milk crates on
the sidewalk.
As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were
blatant.
For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the Asian-American
community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined Chinatown
streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even refused to
allow
a permit for a professionally supervised display. The Christian
equivalent
of this would be banning Christmas trees and decorations because they
occasionally start fires. Giuliani never relented on this. On the Jewish
festival of Purim however, when fireworks are used in the streets of
Jewish
neighborhoods, the police continued to look the other way! They also
ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood streets to destroy leavened
bread before Passover. Can you imagine the police response to this in any
poor, Black, Hispanic, or Asian-American community?
Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance
policy
as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of
fighting
crime, Giuliani had transformed the NYPD into his own private Gestapo,
going
as far as assigning two NYPD detectives, at taxpayer expense, as
round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This after his closing down
all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"
Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a
"rogue
operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." Fa****on-wise,
the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military death squads,
wearing "We Own the Night" t-****rts, and ****rts citing Ernest Hemingway's
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote - quite a variation
from
standard issue uniforms!
This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent
African
immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet after
being
ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to
protest the unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that people were
protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."
Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe
sadistically
shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the same object
into
his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized with serious
injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these sadists said to
him "This is Giuliani time!"
When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner.
Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during
his
tenure, but he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to
take credit for this. During this period crime dropped similarly
nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
methods.
Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
units in the police department. When plainclothes cops asked a black man
on
the street to sell them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took
offense
to being called a drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified
officers, who then SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of
the killer cops, telling the press that Dorismond was "no altar boy."
Salon.com pointed out that in fact he WAS an altar boy! Desperate to
justify the killing, Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of Dorismond's
sealed juvenile record - for disorderly conduct! It seems that under
Giuliani, this justifies the death penalty. Giuliani's contribution to
Dorismond's funeral was a squadron of police in full riot gear, inciting
violence that would not have occurred without their unnecessary and
disrespectful presence.
Former schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, a one-time pal of Giuliani, stated:
"There's something very deeply pathological about Rudy's humanity - He was
barren, completely emotionally barren, on the issue of race." Giuliani's
vile racism has even been acknowledged by his successor, Mayor Bloomberg:
"You forget that every single decision [in the Giuliani administration],
everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race" -
quoted in the November 4, 2003 Daily News from Vanity Fair magazine.
By the time his ****p came in on September 11, 2001, Giuliani's approval
rating, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like 37
percent. Hizzoner got downright weird, proposing a Taliban-style "decency
panel," operated out of his office, that would have the power to determine
what would be considered "art" in New York City. This came after the
debacle of Giuliani's failed attempt to cut public funding for the
Brooklyn
Museum because he considered art on exhibit there to be offensive. He
also
began having nightclubs lacking a cabaret license raided by the police for
allowing patrons to dance. And early in 2001 he ordered a city-wide ban
on
pet ferrets, claiming there was something "deranged" about opponents of
the
ban, and that "excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness."
In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani seized upon
any and every op****tunity to appear the "hero." Despite demanding a
crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and re****ted in the
press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
Giuliani's perhaps most criminally negligent if not malevolent pretense to
heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as
an
impending disaster, and came on like a knight in ****ning armor with a
solution. His solution was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has
caused and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11
assurances that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had the
entire
city repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic
insecticide, and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety
precautions in doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to
prove
in such poisoning cases than when the police are ordered to falsely arrest
someone, or tacitly encouraged to brutally beat or shoot them to death.
Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead or dying therefrom,
former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground
Zero
workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts, and
also
that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned with its
image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the wake of
the subsequent anthrax scare.
Pet ferrets weren't the only ones to get the boot in Giuliani's New York.
Hizzoner boasted of moving people from welfare to workfare, where
thousands
of people earned less than two dollars per hour replacing an equivalent
number of parks department employees whose positions were downsized.
During
this period, 13,000 welfare-dependent City University students were FORCED
TO LEAVE COLLEGE and enter the menial workfare force, where less than six
percent of participants transition to real employment paying minimum wage
or
more. In this we see Giuliani's cruel rewarding of riches and puni****ng
poverty, as if wealth and poverty were not inherently rewarding and
puni****ng conditions.
Mega-real estate developer Donald Trump described Giuliani as "maybe the
best [mayor] ever," obviously meaning the most profitable for him.
However,
Ralph Nader called him "the oligarch's mayor." Giuliani took credit for a
high-end real estate boom while presiding over double-digit rises in
homelessness, cutting public spending on affordable housing by nearly half
and housing for the homeless by nearly three quarters.
Today, "America's mayor" lives and breathes a 9/11 mantra. Forget the
pathetic, cruel, even sadistic details of his tenure in Gracie Mansion; he
is now ****trayed as an iconic American hero
- the "leader" we needed when George W. Bush was otherwise occupied on
September 11, 2001.
But was Giuliani really a hero on that infamous day of horror?
Just like Bush, Giuliani's failing political career was rescued by the
terrorists that attacked New York and Wa****ngton on 9/11. Some believe
these terrorists had help from within the US government, and even that
some
within the government itself were the terrorists. To find criminals, one
must consider who most benefited from the crime.
It is strange if not truly sinister that Giuliani stated to Peter Jennings
in an interview that on 9/11 he had prior knowledge of the World Trade
Center collapses, but subsequently he denied and continues to deny that he
said this. Here Giuliani is caught in a direct lie - you can hear it at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hNmf76GUCw
On 9/11 New York was left without an emergency command center because
Giuliani, against the advice of the police and fire departments, decided
to
locate the center in World Trade Center building 7 along with tanks
containing tens of thousands of gallons of fuel, in direct violation of
New
York City fire laws. This was despite a 1993 bombing of the WTC, proving
it
to be the number one terrorism target. It was this decision that put him
on
the street on 9/11 instead of inside a command center coordinating
operations. Ironically, this decision also put him in front of hundreds
of
press cameras, sparking his image transformation into a "hero."
While our "hero" was posing for the cameras, however, there was no
communication possible between the police department and the fire
department, whose REAL heroes were ru****ng to their deaths inside the
towers. And there was likewise no communication between the police
officers
who identified an open stairway for escape from above the fire zone and
the
911 phone operators who were telling soon-to-be-dead office workers to
stay
put and wait for the firefighters. Giuliani had been aware of the
inadequacy of the emergency services' communications equipment for many
years, but did absolutely nothing about it. This criminal negligence also
doomed hundreds of firefighters and police that were unable to hear the
orders to evacuate the north tower.
Whatever possibility existed for communication between the police and fire
departments, whose radios operated on different frequencies, eva****ated
when
Giuliani visited a make****ft fire/police command center that had formed in
his absence. There he ORDERED THE POLICE BRASS TO LEAVE and accompany him
uptown. This "heroic leader****p" effectively put the fire department and
police department brass in different physical locations with no
communication possible between them.
A month after the September 11 attacks, firefighters took to the streets
to
protest Giuliani's decision to limit the number of uniformed firefighters
and police officers sifting through the rubble for remains, and the "scoop
and dump" haste of the cleanup. They accused the administration of
ru****ng
the cleanup at the cost of tra****ng the remains of victims. [And, it is
pointed out by 9/11 conspiracy theorists, to dispose of any incriminating
evidence as quickly as possible. The steel, some claim bearing evidence
of
demolition explosives, was ****pped to China and quickly melted down.] At
the
firefighters' demonstration Giuliani, in signature style, ordered Peter
Gorman, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, and Kevin
Gallagher, head of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, to be ARRESTED
at
the protest site! A spokesperson for Gallagher told the media "The mayor
fails to realize that New York City is not a dictator****p." Gorman went a
step further, joining hordes of New Yorkers calling the mayor a "fascist"
-
which brings us back to the fascistic conduct issue that dogged Giuliani
throughout his mayoral tenure.
Giuliani often answers the charge by accusing his detractors of ethnic
bias - as if "fascist" were somehow an ethnic slur against
Italian-Americans. His charge itself, however, reeks of
anti-Italian-American ethnic bias, ignoring the role New York's
Italian-American community has played in local politics - giving the city,
for example, its most revered mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. The fascist
charges do not stem from Giuliani's ethnicity, they stem from his own
actions and statements, such as:
" - FREEDOM IS NOT A CONCEPT IN WHICH PEOPLE CAN DO ANYTHING THEY WANT, BE
ANYTHING THEY CAN BE. FREEDOM IS ABOUT AUTHORITY. FREEDOM IS ABOUT THE
WILLINGNESS OF EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING TO CEDE TO LAWFUL AUTHORITY A
GREAT
DEAL OF DISCRETION ABOUT WHAT YOU DO AND HOW YOU DO IT."
- Mayor Giuliani, quoted in the New York Times, March 17, 1994.
Though sworn to uphold our Constitution, by the end of 2002 the courts had
found Giuliani in violation of the First Amendment TWENTY-SEVEN TIMES.
Mayor David Dinkins, his predecessor in office, bravely stated that
Giuliani
is " - a bully, mean-spirited, and he rules through fear and
intimidation."
At reason.com/blog, one finds a statement by David Weigel regarding
Giuliani:
"This is the cornerstone of his philosophy: For liberty to thrive, you
need
to dramatically empower the state and the legal system. Criminals and
would-be criminals should have less freedom in order for the rest of us to
enjoy our freedoms. This is the framework he's applied to basically every
issue - "
Who, we must ask, are the "would-be criminals?" Obviously ALL OF US, as at
one time or another everyone knowingly or unknowingly commits a violation
such as jaywalking, speeding, or drinking in public. So under Giuliani's
rule we ALL have less freedom, and the priveleged "rest of us" are those
that rule over us, the "dramatically empowered" state. Does this sound
like
something out of Mein Kampf?
And you thought that George W. Bush was a dangerous tyrant?
When the lessons of history are ignored, history repeats.
Compare the following to the above Giuliani "freedom" quote:
"State authority must provide for peace and order, and peace and order in
turn must conversely make possible the existence of state authority.
Within
these two poles all life must now revolve...Ideas of 'freedom,' mostly of
a
misunderstood nature, inject themselves into the state conceptions of
these
circles." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
And an old but relevant news story:
Berlin, Monday, Aug. 20, 1934 -- Eighty-nine and nine-tenths percent of
the
German voters endorsed in yesterday's plebiscite Chancellor Hitler's
assumption of greater power than has ever been possessed by any other
ruler
in modern times. Nearly 10 per cent indicated their disapproval. The
result was expected.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Giuliani: Nasty Man - by Edward I. Koch, former NYC mayor.
Giuliani Time (DVD) - with David Dinkins, Ron Kuby, Wayne Barrett, Rudolph
W. Giuliani, Kevin Keating.
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 - by Wayne
Barrett and Dan Collins.
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