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Giuliani's
Decency Commission
Exposed

by Robert Lederman

robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
April 2, 2001

NY Newsday 3/30/2001

City's Gatekeepers of Decency?
Rudy supporters may
police tax-funded museums.

"Robert Lederman, a Manhattan man who began sketching political art of the mayor with a Hitler mustache after the city's arrests of sidewalk art vendors, called the art panel 'ludicrous.' 'If it wasn't so ludicrous, it would be just comical-but unfortunately we've known from watching Giuliani for nearly eight years that he's not kidding,' Lederman said."

From his first days in office in 1994, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been preoccupied with restricting artists' freedom of expression. Before ordering his crackdowns on squeegee guys, hookers, marijuana smokers, community gardens, art museums or the homeless, his 40,000 strong army of police was ordered to arrest the City's street artists.

Before the First Amendment battles in which Giuliani tried to close down the peepshows and topless bars of Times Square to make way for Disney; before he banned press conferences by political opponents on the steps of City Hall; before he tried to enforce obscure prohibition era laws that made dancing in bars illegal, Giuliani was in Federal court trying to eliminate all First Amendment protection for visual art.

Legal briefs Giuliani's lawyers filed in 1994 in response to the A.R.T.I.S.T. group's lawsuit claimed that visual art was unworthy of First Amendment protection because it didn't express ideas and was therefore not communicative. His lawyers and spokespersons maintained this bizarre position all the way to their failed appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.

"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech, literature or live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional interest is thus minimal." -Giuliani appeal brief against street artists having First Amendment protection, Giuliani v Lederman et al and Giuliani v Bery et al.
(Click Here and Here)

"Elizabeth Freedman, an attorney speaking on behalf of the N.Y.C. Corporation Counsel's office [Mayor Giuliani's lawyers], explained the City's anti-art position. "Visual art...does not express ideas", Ms. Friedman said, "and as such is not entitled to First Amendment protection."
From a 2/24/97 radio interview WNYC's syndicated business news show, "Marketplace"

Today Giuliani admits that it is in fact ideas, objectionable ideas, which motivate his attack on artistic freedom. The reality is that censorship of ideas was always the purpose behind Giuliani persecuting artists.

Having me falsely arrested 41 times for painting him as a Hitler-like dictator was about the ideas in my art. Similarly, Giuliani's attacks on the Brooklyn Museum are about censoring the ideas expressed in Chris Olfilli's and Renee Cox's art.

The arrests he ordered of public-space photographer Spencer Tunick, of more than 700 different street artists and of fellow artists and Giuliani-critics Knut Masco, Jack Nesbitt, Wei Zhang, Christopher Brodeur and Stephen Powers show that the Mayor's efforts to censor art he dislikes has nothing to do with the use of taxes and everything to do with repression of artistic expression conveying a controversial political message.

Repression and forced conformity have been the underlying themes of the entire Giuliani administration. As outlined in his most famous quote, Giuliani believes in exerting maximum control over people.
"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority."
Mayor Giuliani, New York Times, March 17, 1994

Ironically, the conformity that Giuliani hopes to enforce through his Art Decency Commission is the opposite of what is most respected and admired in artists - their originality and refusal to conform to orthodoxy.

[-Merriam Webster dictionary definition of Decency: Fitness, orderliness, conformity to standards of taste, propriety, or quality.]

On Tuesday April 3, 2001 at a 10:45 AM press conference in NY City Hall Giuliani will formally announce the creation of his Art Decency Commission. Made up solely of his own appointees all of whom are his personal friends and cronies, the panel will be charged with determining which works of fine art can be exhibited in the City's world famous art museums.

While the Mayor claims his panel will only have authority over museums that receive City funding the reality is that even the City's wealthiest museums use some tax dollars to meet their budget. The Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney as well as numerous small museums, theatre companies, City-owned public access cable television networks, hundreds of neighborhood community cultural programs and all NYC parks would therefore be subject to the decisions of the Art Decency Commission.

Amusing as it may be to make jokes about the psychological quirks of the Mayor being the source of his views on art, there is ample evidence to prove that completely independent of his personal motivations lies a high-level and historically-documentable agenda of censorship for the purpose of preventing political speech by artists. Giuliani is intimately linked to this agenda.

Consider these facts* all of which are fully documented here at my website

• 1. Giuliani proudly admits to getting the ideas for his policies from the Manhattan Institute (MI), a right-wing think tank created in 1978 by William Casey. To give a sense of the influence this organization has in America today, GW Bush claims that next to the Bible the Manhattan Institute is the single greatest influence on his own political ideas. MI is funded by the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan/Chase Bank), pharmaceutical companies and ultra-conservative right wing foundations with direct ties to eugenics and Nazism.
• 2. Casey was a lifelong intelligence operative involved in many of this nation's most notorious covert operations from WWII until his death in 1987. Following the war Casey headed US intelligence in Europe working closely with Reinhard Gehlen, a CIA operative who was formerly Hitler's chief of Soviet intelligence. Casey then headed the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a CIA front located in NYC. Under Casey's leadership the IRC brought thousands of former Nazis to the U.S. for the purposes of propaganda and social control and for their expertise in military and eugenics-based medical research. After manipulating the financial markets as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1960's Casey created the Manhattan Institute, the think tank behind the Giuliani and GW Bush administrations. Casey played a leading role in getting Nixon elected, was Reagan's campaign manager and was Reagan's CIA director for both of his terms in office. Giuliani was the #3 official in the Reagan Justice Department.

To give some idea of how Casey and friends approached the issue of free speech, consider this one example. After becoming angry at ABC-TV's coverage of the Reagan administration's foreign policy objectives, CIA director Casey tried to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to terminate ABC's operating license. When the FCC refused, Casey's Capital Cities, a consortium of former CIA operatives who became wealthy by using their connections and intelligence expertise to manipulate the stock market, bought ABCTV specifically in order to censor their news department. Ask any NYC reporter about Giuliani's behind the scenes efforts to censor the news, get reporters fired etc. He learned from a master of censorship.

ABC was later sold to Disney. Giuliani, or Disneyani as he is sometimes known, admits that Disney has been the number one corporate force behind the cultural sterilization of midtown Manhattan during the past eight years. We've had the Disnification of Times Square, now under Giuliani we will have the Disnification of the City's art museums and culture.

• 3. In Germany during the 1930's Adolf Hitler began dictating what kind of art was to be allowed in a campaign strikingly similar to Mayor Giuliani's. Using the exact same justification as Giuliani is using in NYC and in some cases the exact same words and arguments, Hitler declared that the avant garde art of Germany was anti-Catholic and that tax dollars should not be used to pay for displaying such art. He defunded museums, arrested artists and confiscated tens of thousands of paintings and sculptures, many of which are now considered some of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century. Hitler's real beef with German art was that it was critical of him and the Nazi regime. For the quotes, see Giuliani on Art, Hitler on Art at
• 4. Adolf Hitler's rise to power was financed by some of William Casey's closest friends and associates. This clique of oil, chemical, manufacturing and Wall Street banking executives included GW Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush, John D. Rockefeller III, brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles and Averill Harriman.

Following the war this clique adopted the propaganda and social manipulation techniques that the Nazis had developed in order to control American public opinion and silence their critics. Today these techniques have been combined with further research by Madison Ave. ad companies and behavioral scientists to fashion almost foolproof techniques of opinion manipulation, mind control and disinformation. Artistic freedom is a direct threat to this kind of social control.

Using an unlimited budget supplied by the newly formed CIA (of which Allen Dulles became the first director) they created numerous front organizations which promoted pro-American and pro-corporate culture. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the media were full-partners in these efforts, with CIA operatives and colleagues of this elite clique heading many of the major newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, television networks and boards of charitable foundations.

Until the counter-culture erupted on the scene in the 1960's and temporarily shook the nation loose from their control, virtually every aspect of mainstream American literature, theatre, publishing, orchestral music, film and fine art was directly influenced if not completely controlled by this clique. While these men claimed that defeating Communism was their purpose the reality is that these same Wall Street banking interests and industrialists had financed both the Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy.

Social control rather than any particular ideology left or right is all they are loyal to. Like Rudolph Giuliani they can move freely from conservatism to liberalism and back, as the situation requires.

Today we are ruled by a new generation of their successors, many of whom - like GW Bush - have inherited the political positions, wealth and ideas of their fathers. It's not a coincidence that many of GW Bush's top advisors are associated with the Manhattan Institute or that they were the inventors of compassionate conservatism, an ideology with more than a passing similarity to Hitler's eugenics policies.

• 5. A recently published book which I highly recommend, "The Cultural Cold War-the CIA and the world of arts and letters" by Frances Stoner Saunders published by the New Press, provides a detailed examination of how the CIA sponsored cultural propaganda then and continues to do so today. Particularly relevant to the issue at hand was the sudden prominence in the 1950's art world of Abstract Expressionism.

While struggling abstract painters like Jackson Pollack (whose work I admire) legitimately developed their unique styles it is a historical fact that the abrupt universal acceptance of their art and it's ubiquitous display in government buildings, corporate headquarters and museums was engineered by the CIA working directly with the Rockefeller family's Museum of Modern Art. The goal was to undermine the cultural popularity of art with a recognizable human subject which, as my paintings of Giuliani and the controversial Brooklyn Museum shows demonstrate, is perfectly suited to criticizing those in authority be they political or religious leaders.

Wander through the immense museums run by the Rockefellers, the Whitneys, the DuPonts, the Ford Foundation and the U.S. government. You will and see room after room of huge paintings that in many cases are nothing more than a splash of paint or a single color without any subject. Are we looking at the refined taste of the corporate elite or a conspiracy to eliminate figurative expression with a political message?

Giuliani's censorship efforts are ultimately not about his own parochial tastes in art but are aimed at advancing the objectives of those he works for. The idea is to chill speech generally and specifically to intimidate influential museums that might be tempted to show art that criticizes those in power. Such shows could inspire a new generation of artists to use their talents in the fight for social justice.

If you think it is far-fetched to believe that politicians fear art, consider this. Mayor Giuliani has spent millions of tax dollars having me falsely arrested, processing my criminal cases, confiscating my paintings and defending his constitutionally unsound position in Federal court. The NY Post, his most obsequious defender in the media, has published eight editorials denouncing my Giuliani-as-Hitler paintings. Undercover police officers posing as members of A.R.T.I.S.T. "collected" hundreds of my paintings from protestors during the Diallo demonstrations while the Mayor made numerous public statements demanding that people not carry them.

From: -Newsweek 4/5/99 Rudy on the Record
Question: "Are you personally stung by those signs at the demonstrations that say 'Adolf Giuliani'?"
Mayor Giuliani: "Five years ago I might have cried over it. And now I just feel that this is a crazy exaggeration that we've allowed, and that our media coverage is selective... You cover Susan Sarandon. But [the police and the rest of the city] see the Adolf Hitler signs, the comparisons to the president of Yugoslavia. These [demonstrators] are getting arrested, some knowingly, some unknowingly, under that banner."

In Hitler's time many prominent Germans from the cultural sphere were anxious to jump on the Nazi bandwagon by denouncing aspects of German art. In 1950's American artists, filmmakers and writers succumbed to government threats and blackmail and testified before the McCarthy hearings by denouncing their most outspoken and progressive fellow artists as "commies" and subversives.

NYC artists, actors, lawyers or religious leaders who would willingly serve on the Mayor's Decency Commission are far more despicable than those who cooperated under extreme pressure with the McCarthy hearings. They are willing traitors to the principles of free speech. First Amendment freedom is the basis for artistic and religious freedom and for all that is most revered about America.

On April 3 at 10 AM join me
outside NY City Hall
to protest the Decency Commission.
Bring your own art or some else's
and help stand up for
freedom of speech.

To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum website

His essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.

Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net

For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htm

If you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
No Spray Coalition
PO Box 334
Peck Slip Station
NYC, NY 10272-0334
or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.

Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
and this work are greatly appreciated.

Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.

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