F
Freedom Fighter
Guest
"Giuliani Time": Just When You Thought You Knew How Evil He Is
By Lisa Gray-Garcia, AlterNet
Posted on December 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/69409/
"Peddlers, panhandlers and prostitutes, they all need to be cleaned out [of
Manhattan]." The first time I heard Rudy Giuliani speak was on a NBC nightly
news broadcast. It was 1996. I was living in Oakland, Calif., at the time --
3,000 miles away from Manhattan, where, as mayor, Giuliani was implementing
his "clean-up campaign." But the sting of his speech still scared me.
[And unknown to us then, while "cleaning out" these sometimes annoying but
mostly harmless poor people, Giuliani himself was cleaning out city funds
intended to assist the poor to provide luxury transportation and police
security for his adulterous affair!]
It was the first time I had heard hygienic metaphors to describe poor people
like me who were surviving in an underground street-based economy. Rudy
Giuliani had become mayor of New York City on a campaign that constructed a
new scapegoat for all of America's crime problems: "the squeegee man" (aka a
person who cleans car windows at stop lights).
Giuliani was emboldened with "the broken window" philosophy, which claimed
that if broken windows remain unfixed for a period of time the tendency is
for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break
into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light
fires inside.
[The same logic applies to the public tolerance of abuse of power by those,
like Giuliani, in a position to do so. The tyrant is limited only by the
tolerance of the multitude he oppresses. The public greatly outnumber the
police that such despots rely on to protect them. It is no wonder tyrants
like Giuliani always advocate "gun control" to disarm the citizenry whose
rebellion they fear.]
The theory was promoted by the hyperconservative Manhattan Institute and was
already litmus tested by N.Y. Police chief Bill Bratton. In his now-infamous
statement, Giuliani publicly linked three street-based economies and
communities with dirt or trash: They were something to be "cleaned up" as a
means to create the perfect American city.
Under his rule, ridding Manhattan of the newly designated and oxymoronic
"quality of life" criminals such as panhandlers, recyclers, window washers
(aka squeegee men), vendors, sex industry workers, hot dog peddlers and
street artists was the way to have a crime-free, user-friendly, corporate
dollar-fueled city.
All of these memories came to me as I watched the little-seen but important
documentary Giuliani Time. The two-hour-and-20-minute feature, produced and
directed by Kevin Keating, uses a series of in-depth interviews with policy
makers, advocates, sociologists and urban planners to reveal how Giuliani's
policies during his reign from 1994-2001 led to extreme and dangerous police
empowerment and subsequent decimation of human and civil rights,
particularly those of poor people and minority communities. The film shows
how he created a template for criminalization that would be eventually
emulated and implemented by mayors across the country -- from Atlanta to San
Francisco.
The movie begins with a look at Giuliani's family roots with crime and vice:
His uncle Harold was a loan shark out of a bar he ran in Brooklyn and
eventually did hard time in Sing Sing. It then follows Giuliani's ambitious
rise from state attorney general to a mayor who appropriated as his own the
"quality of life" crime campaign from then-police chief Bratton.
The film shows a somewhat dense series of interviews outlining Giuliani's
draconian strategy of using New York police to attack and manipulate the
short-lived mayoral run of David Dinkins. Once he achieved his position as
mayor, Giuliani began an onslaught of race-based profiling and harassment of
African-American communities in New York by the NYPD.
Simultaneously, he launched a campaign to cut people off welfare en masse,
regardless of its impact on poor families, to have homeless people
considered criminals, and to have the simple acts of sitting, standing and
sleeping outdoors and surviving on a street-based economy designated as
crimes.
His welfare policies succeeded in making Giuliani the mayor best known for
getting 600,000 welfare recipients off welfare and into a new form of
slavery, "workfare." Workfare is the hard labor (that isn't considered real
work by the welfare system and most of society for that matter) one must do
to get the minimal cash aid distributed by welfare. This includes doing
previously union-held jobs like crack-of-dawn street sweeping and public
restroom cleaning, and other forms of menial labor, for much less than
minimum wage.
As this documentary revealed, Giuliani's police policies resulted in the
specific profiling, abuse and arrest of men of color. The film shows the
horrors that resulted from a newly emboldened police force -- including the
savage brutalization of Hatian immigrant Abner Louima and the murder of
Amadou Diallo.
As the daughter of a poor, homeless woman of color who worked on the street
to survive in L.A., Oakland and San Francisco, I have felt the direct impact
of locally implemented Giuliani-derived criminalizing policies over the last
10 years such as the Business Improvement District (BID), which in San
Francisco was based in Union Square but modeled after Giuliani's BID in
Times Square. Each BID includes a squared-off area that is policed by a
private police force that cites, harasses and profiles everyone selling,
sitting or standing who appears to be "poor." With the BIDs come the
so-called "community courts," which are courts dedicated to the adjudication
of "poverty crimes," i.e, selling without a license, trespassing, sleeping,
and other low-level "crimes" of poverty.
After viewing this documentary, I became even more terrified of Giuliani's
impact. Rarely has one man so successfully harnessed the hatred and
ignorance of the U.S. public for poor people and people of color. And rarely
has the connection between race, class, xenophobia and ableism been so
clearly played out in legislative actions such as the BIDs, community courts
and overall police harassment of poor people that reverberate today in
cities across the United States and is referred to by economic justice
organizers as the "Manhattanization" of a city.
Quite by accident I was able to witness firsthand the impact of Giulani-like
policies in action in Georgia. As a member of a delegation to the U.S.
Social Forum, I visited Atlanta. Upon entering one of their business
improvement districts, aka a Disney-like mall "town" that included chain
stores and restaurants, I was met with a small corporate-logo covered police
car filled with "officers" who wore cartoon-like bounty hunter hats. When
some of my group and myself attempted to lean against a light pole and make
a cell phone call we were asked to move because our leaning created a
"perception of loitering."
As a low-income resident of San Francisco, another one of thousands of U.S.
cities following Giuliani's model for "cleanliness," I grapple every day
with the new science fiction-like world of where to sleep, sit, stand or
dwell in a public place as a poor person when all of those things can be a
crime. Where, even if you don't "look homeless," the mere perception of
loitering is a citable offense.
Like some of the worst and bloodiest horror movies, you want to cringe and
look away from Giuliani Time, but hold on to your seat, watch, look and
listen carefully, because this man is running for president, and we must act
now or his new form of fascism masked as "cleanliness" will be the norm for
the entire United States.
------------------------
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." New
York's previous mayor, Ed Koch, has said that Giuliani " - uses the levers
of power to punish." 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.
But the tyrant's own words say it best:
" - 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.
"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.
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.
By Lisa Gray-Garcia, AlterNet
Posted on December 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/69409/
"Peddlers, panhandlers and prostitutes, they all need to be cleaned out [of
Manhattan]." The first time I heard Rudy Giuliani speak was on a NBC nightly
news broadcast. It was 1996. I was living in Oakland, Calif., at the time --
3,000 miles away from Manhattan, where, as mayor, Giuliani was implementing
his "clean-up campaign." But the sting of his speech still scared me.
[And unknown to us then, while "cleaning out" these sometimes annoying but
mostly harmless poor people, Giuliani himself was cleaning out city funds
intended to assist the poor to provide luxury transportation and police
security for his adulterous affair!]
It was the first time I had heard hygienic metaphors to describe poor people
like me who were surviving in an underground street-based economy. Rudy
Giuliani had become mayor of New York City on a campaign that constructed a
new scapegoat for all of America's crime problems: "the squeegee man" (aka a
person who cleans car windows at stop lights).
Giuliani was emboldened with "the broken window" philosophy, which claimed
that if broken windows remain unfixed for a period of time the tendency is
for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break
into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light
fires inside.
[The same logic applies to the public tolerance of abuse of power by those,
like Giuliani, in a position to do so. The tyrant is limited only by the
tolerance of the multitude he oppresses. The public greatly outnumber the
police that such despots rely on to protect them. It is no wonder tyrants
like Giuliani always advocate "gun control" to disarm the citizenry whose
rebellion they fear.]
The theory was promoted by the hyperconservative Manhattan Institute and was
already litmus tested by N.Y. Police chief Bill Bratton. In his now-infamous
statement, Giuliani publicly linked three street-based economies and
communities with dirt or trash: They were something to be "cleaned up" as a
means to create the perfect American city.
Under his rule, ridding Manhattan of the newly designated and oxymoronic
"quality of life" criminals such as panhandlers, recyclers, window washers
(aka squeegee men), vendors, sex industry workers, hot dog peddlers and
street artists was the way to have a crime-free, user-friendly, corporate
dollar-fueled city.
All of these memories came to me as I watched the little-seen but important
documentary Giuliani Time. The two-hour-and-20-minute feature, produced and
directed by Kevin Keating, uses a series of in-depth interviews with policy
makers, advocates, sociologists and urban planners to reveal how Giuliani's
policies during his reign from 1994-2001 led to extreme and dangerous police
empowerment and subsequent decimation of human and civil rights,
particularly those of poor people and minority communities. The film shows
how he created a template for criminalization that would be eventually
emulated and implemented by mayors across the country -- from Atlanta to San
Francisco.
The movie begins with a look at Giuliani's family roots with crime and vice:
His uncle Harold was a loan shark out of a bar he ran in Brooklyn and
eventually did hard time in Sing Sing. It then follows Giuliani's ambitious
rise from state attorney general to a mayor who appropriated as his own the
"quality of life" crime campaign from then-police chief Bratton.
The film shows a somewhat dense series of interviews outlining Giuliani's
draconian strategy of using New York police to attack and manipulate the
short-lived mayoral run of David Dinkins. Once he achieved his position as
mayor, Giuliani began an onslaught of race-based profiling and harassment of
African-American communities in New York by the NYPD.
Simultaneously, he launched a campaign to cut people off welfare en masse,
regardless of its impact on poor families, to have homeless people
considered criminals, and to have the simple acts of sitting, standing and
sleeping outdoors and surviving on a street-based economy designated as
crimes.
His welfare policies succeeded in making Giuliani the mayor best known for
getting 600,000 welfare recipients off welfare and into a new form of
slavery, "workfare." Workfare is the hard labor (that isn't considered real
work by the welfare system and most of society for that matter) one must do
to get the minimal cash aid distributed by welfare. This includes doing
previously union-held jobs like crack-of-dawn street sweeping and public
restroom cleaning, and other forms of menial labor, for much less than
minimum wage.
As this documentary revealed, Giuliani's police policies resulted in the
specific profiling, abuse and arrest of men of color. The film shows the
horrors that resulted from a newly emboldened police force -- including the
savage brutalization of Hatian immigrant Abner Louima and the murder of
Amadou Diallo.
As the daughter of a poor, homeless woman of color who worked on the street
to survive in L.A., Oakland and San Francisco, I have felt the direct impact
of locally implemented Giuliani-derived criminalizing policies over the last
10 years such as the Business Improvement District (BID), which in San
Francisco was based in Union Square but modeled after Giuliani's BID in
Times Square. Each BID includes a squared-off area that is policed by a
private police force that cites, harasses and profiles everyone selling,
sitting or standing who appears to be "poor." With the BIDs come the
so-called "community courts," which are courts dedicated to the adjudication
of "poverty crimes," i.e, selling without a license, trespassing, sleeping,
and other low-level "crimes" of poverty.
After viewing this documentary, I became even more terrified of Giuliani's
impact. Rarely has one man so successfully harnessed the hatred and
ignorance of the U.S. public for poor people and people of color. And rarely
has the connection between race, class, xenophobia and ableism been so
clearly played out in legislative actions such as the BIDs, community courts
and overall police harassment of poor people that reverberate today in
cities across the United States and is referred to by economic justice
organizers as the "Manhattanization" of a city.
Quite by accident I was able to witness firsthand the impact of Giulani-like
policies in action in Georgia. As a member of a delegation to the U.S.
Social Forum, I visited Atlanta. Upon entering one of their business
improvement districts, aka a Disney-like mall "town" that included chain
stores and restaurants, I was met with a small corporate-logo covered police
car filled with "officers" who wore cartoon-like bounty hunter hats. When
some of my group and myself attempted to lean against a light pole and make
a cell phone call we were asked to move because our leaning created a
"perception of loitering."
As a low-income resident of San Francisco, another one of thousands of U.S.
cities following Giuliani's model for "cleanliness," I grapple every day
with the new science fiction-like world of where to sleep, sit, stand or
dwell in a public place as a poor person when all of those things can be a
crime. Where, even if you don't "look homeless," the mere perception of
loitering is a citable offense.
Like some of the worst and bloodiest horror movies, you want to cringe and
look away from Giuliani Time, but hold on to your seat, watch, look and
listen carefully, because this man is running for president, and we must act
now or his new form of fascism masked as "cleanliness" will be the norm for
the entire United States.
------------------------
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." New
York's previous mayor, Ed Koch, has said that Giuliani " - uses the levers
of power to punish." 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.
But the tyrant's own words say it best:
" - 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.
"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.
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.