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Rudy Giuliani's Greatness
(Poison of the Year)by Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
December 27, 200112/27/2001
re: Rudy Giuliani's Greatness
(Poison of the Year)Dear Editor,
Mayor Giuliani has received an avalanche of praise and credit post 9/11, yet eight years of media reports and articles published in your own and every other NYC paper seem to refute all of the claims now being made for his "greatness". What are your readers to make of the conflict between your previous eight years of Giuliani coverage and the recent stories and tributes?
Did Giuliani really curtail crime? As you have previously reported on many occasions, the drop in crime he's credited with occurred nation-wide (and even in Europe) and in NYC began years before Giuliani became Mayor.
Is Giuliani a financial and budgetary expert who saved the City's economy and who will now "turn around" troubled businesses as a high-priced consultant? As you've reported, he's leaving the City with a 4 billion-dollar plus budget deficit, most of which is unrelated to 9/11. In his last few days in office after cutting funding for health, schools, hospitals, libraries and the aged he's still desperately trying to foist baseball stadiums on us to benefit two billionaire friends who own the Mets and Yankees.
Did he really improve our Quality of Life? The schools, which impact tremendously on the City's long-term future, are far worse than at any time in modern history. Did he clean up the streets? Outside of the Times Sq., Midtown and other areas patrolled and cleaned numerous times a day by the Business Improvement Districts the streets are no cleaner or safer than they were in 1993. Read the crime page of your own paper and tell me there's no more crime in NYC.
While arresting thousands each month for public urination the City you now claim Giuliani "civilized" still does not have a single public pay toilet - something Giuliani promised for eight years and spent millions doing studies on. If I'm not mistaken, ancient Rome had public toilets as do most "civilized countries today.
Our infrastructure is a shambles, with crumbling schools, hospitals and bridges. A drive down any New York street will find ours to be the most potholed and damaged streets and sidewalks in the entire U.S.
Does quality of life have anything to do with our health? Thousands of New Yorkers have developed new health problems due to Giuliani's unprecedented spraying of nerve gas-based pesticides invented in Nazi Germany to fight a hyped up "mosquito epidemic". Violating the instructions printed right on the canisters - which explicitly say they are never to be used near people - Giuliani ordered them sprayed directly on hundreds of thousands of men, women and children while daily lying at his press conferences that they were "harmless". He even bragged that he was directly sprayed eight times without getting sick (until he came down with prostate cancer, a known effect of pesticides exposure, shortly thereafter).
Was he a great supporter of the police, as compared to what he likes to call, "cop bashers"? The cops and firemen he claims to love are quitting in record numbers and blaming him for their meager salaries, health problems, lack of proper equipment and low morale.
Is he really a great lawyer? The estimated financial liability from lawsuits filed in response to his illegal policies is larger than the economy of many countries. He's lost virtually every lawsuit brought against the City during his administration - 25 on the First Amendment alone - and now more than 500 firemen are joining the list of those suing the Mayor.
Did he really unite New Yorkers? Giuliani's overt hostility to minorities and racial-profiling policies leaves the City more racially divided than at any time since the 1960's. The consequences of his eugenics-inspired Manhattan Institute welfare and homelessness initiatives will be among the new Mayor's most hard-to-solve social problems.
Apart from his false reputation for stopping crime, Giuliani is falsely credited with instituting genuine welfare reform - but did he? As reported many times in your paper his failed workfare program was a thinly-veiled attempt to replace the City's hundreds of thousands of unionized municipal workers with below minimum wage workers with no health benefits or pensions. At the same time the Mayor was forcing mothers with small children off welfare so that they could experience "self sufficiency" and learn the "dignity of work" he was using our tax dollars to give billions in welfare to his supporters in real estate, publishing and Wall Street. Among the many needy folks he's helped are David Rockefeller, the owners of the NY Stock Exchange and Donald Trump.
Is he really a "hero"? New Yorkers are famous for being able to take just about anything in stride, which to his credit, even Giuliani admits it is in our nature to do - completely without his help.
As far as his "heroic" response to the attack, at best Giuliani did exactly what Mayor Dinkins, Mayor Koch or any other Mayor in the world would have done by asking people not to panic and by attending funerals and holding press conferences - if you can his muzzling of reporters and refusal to answer any unapproved question a "press conference". Short on information and shorter still on accurate information, most of his "press conferences" were nothing more than emotional tributes to himself, his friends and his aides.
As you've reported he doubled the number of WTC casualties, repeatedly lied about the health risks to local residents, made families of WTC victims wait months to get their first check, misled small business owners into believing they'd be given immediate financial aid, lied to the firemen about carefully recovering all of the human remains no matter how long it took and ordered cameras seized from anyone without his approval taking photos at the site. If being a disaster site tour guide to movie stars and foreign dignitaries bearing tributes to him makes Giuliani a hero, then the word has lost some of its traditional meaning.
Rather than a 9/11 "hero" Giuliani might eventually end up a 9/11 defendant. The fuel illegally stored in his completely useless 13 million dollar "bomb proof" bunker in direct violation of the NYC fire code caused WTC7 to collapse. He repeatedly and knowingly misinformed the residents of lower Manhattan and all of the rescue workers about the health risks from exposure to the toxic fumes. Since 9/11 he's been meticulously obstructing the government's investigation into why the towers fell by destroying the steel beams and other evidence before any of it can be examined.
The same reporters now penning article after article about him being, "America's Mayor" and "Our Rudy" previously penned article after article about him violating the Constitution; maliciously targeting minorities; having numerous financial connections to racists and the far right; suppressing legitimate dissent; hiding the true statistics about City government from elected officials, judges and the media; committing serial adultery while speechifying about "decency"; dictating artistic taste to museums and artists; falsely arresting hundreds of thousands of people on trumped-up charges and firing any of his own appointees who gained a level of public recognition which in any way diminished his own imaginary stature.
Giuliani certainly lucked out on 9/11. Aside from completely obliterating the Twin Towers, the attack seems to have completely obliterated eight years of documented failures, lies and falsifications that constitute the real Giuliani Legacy. Such is the confused time we live in that the City's cruelest, most dishonest and hypocritical Mayor is being called its greatest.
When Time magazine named the Mayor "Person of the Year" they may have been playing a bit of a linguistic prank. In Brooklyn where Giuliani was born, "person" is often mispronounced "poison". Rudy Giuliani -Poison of the Year. It has a certain ring of truth to it.
Robert Lederman
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
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 websiteHis 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.htmIf you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
No Spray Coalition
PO Box 334
Peck Slip Station
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or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
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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.Blue Collar Pundit Essays
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