Click Here to return to the
Blue Collar Politics Blog.To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Giuliani is an
Israel Day Parade Abominationby Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
June 3, 2000Whitewashing Nazis, discriminating against Blacks, censoring speech and insulting the media-whatever happened to the new improved Giuliani? Apparently, much like his fake statistics and unjustified claims to have personally saved New York City, the promise of a softer kinder gentler Giuliani is propaganda which his Deputy Mayors and hundreds more of his personal staff are busily promoting.
Having reaped the maximum amount of sympathy and publicity from announcing (and in many people's opinion, grossly exaggerating the urgency of) his prostprostate cancer, publicly dumping his wife and then tearfully dropping out of a Senate race he wawas never actually in, Giuliani has remainremained the mean-spirited, vindictive authoritarian we are all familiar with.
The Giuliani love-fest culminating in the Mayor's patently phony claim that he would reach out to minorities and try to rectify some of the countless wrongs he has done to the City's non-elite residents has run its mercifully brief course. However, much of the NY media still continue to peddle this absurd story.
Seemingly working from a script prepared by the Mayor's own press aides, some media outlets have been trying their best to depict recent meetings with NYC Comptroller Alan Hevesi and Public Advocate Mark Green as proof of Rudy being a different man. All it proves is that when it suits his personal goals Giuliani will do or say just about anything. Normally, that's called being an unprincipled liar.
Here's a few of the latest examples of why this Mayor will be remembered by future generations of New Yorkers as the most dishonest, vindictive, prejudiced and corrupt official in NYC history.
Fiberglass Cows to Cleanse the Nazi Past
Perhaps you have heard that 500 fiberglass cow replicas will soon be grazing on NY City's public streets courtesy of Mayor Giuliani and the Swiss government. It seems the Swiss, who own a huge amount of NYC real estate, felt their false image as peace-loving neutrals had been tarnished by recent news stories and international lawsuits depicting them as facilitators and economic allies of the Nazis. The solution? A semi-permanently installed faux cow parade for NYC.
Mayor Giuliani personally gave the project both his blessing and a press conference on the once public steps of City Hall. Like many Giuliani initiatives this one subtly combines art, Nazism and corporate influence in a mind-boggling array of disinfomation, corporate favoritism and corruption.
You'll recall that this same Mayor has waged a vicious seven year long war on street artists, claiming that they threaten safety by obstructing the public streets of this City. These 500 fiberglass cows each take up almost the exact same eight foot by three foot area that a NYC street artist is allowed to occupy by law.
They also vastly outnumber street artists and unlike an artist's stand will be on display twenty-four hours a day seven days a week-most likely surrounded by sidewalk-clogging throngs of tourists who are no longer able to see NYC from the top of a bus.Each cow will be handpainted by a lucky NYC artist-the same artists whose Constitutional right to free speech has been consistently abridged and violated throughout the Giuliani administration.
You'll recall that this is the same Mayor who viciously attacked the Brooklyn Museum over a blob of elephant dung (not to be confused with cow dung or the abundant piles of steaming horse dung the NYPD mounted police leave in the middle of our streets) and who claimed the Whitney Museums' exhibit of conceptual art rightly comparing him to Adolf Hitler denigrated the Holocaust.
This is the same Mayor who offered the pro-Nazi Rockefeller family's Museum of Modern Art sixty-five million tax dollars to renovate their collection-which includes numerous works looted by the Nazis from Jews on their way to the gas chambers. The Rockefeller's bank, Chase Manhattan, was Hitler's greatest supporter among world banks and is not cooincidentally the Mayor's greatest ally among NYC banks. Giuliani has given Chase hundreds of millions of dollars in tax write-offs and billions in free publicity as well as unprecented police protection during recent demonstrations.
This is the Mayor who publicly calls the President, the Attorney General and Federal law officers, Nazi Storm Troopers, yet has me falsely arrested on a regular basis for painting him with a Hitler mustache.
This is the same Mayor who admits he gets all of his ideas from the Manhattan Institute, a right wing think tank with direct links to racism, Eugenics, the CIA's secret war against US citizens and the Nazis. It's the same Mayor who repeatedly sprayed a Nazi-invented organophosphate nerve gas on the entire City last year to fight a non-existent mosquito epidemic. And yes, it's the same Mayor who dined and posed for photos with Jorge Haider, Austria's most famous neo-Nazi, whose parents were both SS members and who has publicly praised Hitler and the SS.
This weekend Giuliani will proudly march in the Israel Day Parade while helping the Swiss whitewash their own Nazi connection. As a Jew I find Giuliani's presence in this parade an abomination.
It's interesting to note that the ex-husband of the Mayor's new girlfriend claims that she routinely made anti-Semitic comments during their marriage. The Mayor has a long history of manipulating issues in order to depict himself as a friend to the Jewish community. He needs to. The truth behind his many connections to the Nazis needs a lot of effort to cover up. Using BS cow art to obscure the Swiss government's Nazi connection denigrates the Holocaust almost as much as Giuliani's presence in the Israel Day Parade does.
Streets Are For Cows,
Parks Are for Yankee Pep RalliesDid the Mayor actually say he wanted to reach out to minorities-or was it that he wanted to keep out minorities? The latest efforts by the Giuliani administration to deny free speech in a public park seem to indicate it was keep out that Rudy had in mind.
Rap promoter Russell Simmons wanted to hold a voter-rally at City Hall Park in order to register the City's Black and Latino youth. The only problem was that Simmons had said some unkind words about the Mayor. "Vengeance is Mine!"saith Giuliani, who then denied the rally a permit. When confronted about the rally Giuliani's spokespersons claimed the Mayor didn't even know who Simmons was, despite stories in NYC papers and newsmagazines a few days before describing an unflattering photo of the Mayor on Simmons' website. Simmons had also recently held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton-not exactly the way to get on Rudy's good side (does he have a good side?).
Despite his reassurances to the contrary, politics is still very much the Mayor's number one priority, right behind trashing the Constitution and showing off his new girlfriend.Making the Tour Buses Run On Time
New Yorkers who live in SoHo and other gentrified neighborhoods are glad to see Big Apple Bus Tours lose their operating license. The buses were too large for many streets and were belching almost as much filth into the air as NYC buses do. One might think after seeing a few weeks of the Mayor and various commissioners denouncing the company that the Giuliani administration was sincerely concerned about our quality of life and acted accordingly.
Not exactly. According to an article in Newsday (which continues to be the best mainstream source of true reports on the Mayor), the Giuliani administration was running interference for the beleaguered company at the same time they were publicly attacking them. At least one City official was almost demoted for trying to enforce City ordinances against the bus company. It was only when community activists and City Council Members raised a huge stink about the buses, culminating in a fatal accident involving an elderly pedestrian, that the Mayor got serious about getting one of his obediant Consumer Affairs judges to pull their license.
Expect to see a new bus company take over where Big Apple left off as soon as they can arrange a big donation to Rudy. As long as tourists have more rights in this town than its residents the tour buses will keep on rolling, albeit under a different corporate name.The Execution President Goes Compassionate
While George Bush wanted to be remembered as the Education President it seems his son, intellectually-challenged Presidential candidate GW Bush, wants not to be remembered as the Execution President. Breaking his unprecedented record of enthusiastically overseeing 131 executions without once granting a reprieve, GW suddenly decided that Ricky McGinn, a white man scheduled to die for the brutal rape and murder of his own stepdaughter, deserves another DNA test despite admitting that he committed the murder.
Might it be politics rather than compassion motivating the Texas Governor and Giuliani pal? McGinn's DNA test will have one unquestionable benefit for the Bush agenda either way it turns out-helping to justify the mandatory DNA sampling of every American that Bush, Giuliani and Pataki are advocating. Once the government has our DNA on file the fulfillment of every nightmare imaginable about Eugenics, forced sterilizations, euthanasia of "social undesirables"and laws against reproducing without government permission will become our daily reality.
Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was among Hitler's most valuable assets in the U.S. When the US Congress seized Bush's banking assets in 1942 it temporarily sidetracked the families' efforts on behalf of the Third Reich. Welcome to the Fourth Reich, beginning with a GW Bush presidency in 2001. When GW appoints Giuliani US Attorney General we'll all get to see these two men's compassion at work. They will give the term "mercy killing"a new meaning.
Giuliani is no La Guardia
The Mayor loves to say that 1930's NYC Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia is his role model. Giuliani certainly isn't following La Guardia's lead on the marijuana issue.
While Rudy has made arresting people for possession or even smoking marijuana a centerpiece of his administration, with hundreds of thousands of such arrests each year, La Guardia commissioned a study which found, "...the sociological, psychological and medical ills commonly attributed to marijuana have been exaggerated insofar as the City of New York is concerned."
NY Times May 31, 2000
Is Nothing Sacred?
Discontent Over a Cow ParadeIt wasn't long ago that Americans, if they thought of Switzerland at all, had visions of alpine meadows, chocolate and fondue. But that was before the public relations debacle unleashed by the failure by Swiss banks to return Holocaust victims' money to their families. So the Swiss government needed something to improve its image. It embraced fiberglass cows. Three fiberglass cow forms, mass-produced, life-size and decorated by local artists, were set up on Zurich streets as a cow parade in 1998.
New York plans to follow suit in June, a fact noted on this page earlier this month...The first 50 cows, shipped over by a Swiss government foundation last fall to be painted by children in New York public schools, turned out to be made of a material that, when exposed to flame, transformed the glossy figures into roman candles.
The cows were swiftly shipped back, and the Swiss government organization that had backed the event, the Coordinating Commission for the Presence of Switzerland Abroad (known as CoCo in Switzerland), pulled out of the New York cow parade. CoCo, which was given $30 million by the Swiss government last year to improve the country's image after the banking scandal, said that it did not want to endanger the lives of schoolchildren.
"The cows will be used in other countries," said Jacques Reverdin, the Swiss consul general in New York, "but certainly not in schools." The American partner in the firm set up to organize New York's cow parade, for which some 500 fiberglass cows will be on display in all five boroughs, walked out on his Swiss partners, calling the Swiss cows "junk.""They weren't actually making them in Switzerland, but in Bosnia," said Mr. Blume, a shareholder in the Cow Parade Holdings Corporation, an American company. "One smart bomb could have taken out our whole operation. The resin was of poor quality, there were no metal supports. They could fall over on people. When you flipped the reclining cow upside down it was hollow. It looked like a bathtub. Someone could get trapped inside...."
Daily News 6/1/2000
Miffed Hip-Hopper Raps Mayor
on Park Voter RallyBy Michael R. Blood
Daily News City Hall Bureau ChiefRap mogul Russell Simmons called Mayor Giuliani a "thug"and a "bully"yesterday, accusing the city of pulling the plug on a voter-registration rally at City Hall Park featuring recording star Mary J. Blige. "I don't think there's a nice bone in his body," said Simmons, founder of Def Jam records. "He thinks hip hop is made up of thugs, but he's the thug. He's a big bully."
The Rap the Vote 2000 event ultimately was conducted at the Sheraton New York in midtown. "I can't tell you how much it both saddens and sickens me that Mayor Giuliani would choose to thwart our efforts to involve more young people in the political process," the rap impresario said. "We repeatedly invited him to participate."
The event was intended to launch a public-service campaign to register young voters, especially in urban areas, and urge them to get involved in politics and in issues "facing urban youth today, particularly racial profiling and police brutality."The organization, a joint venture of Rock the Vote and Simmons' www.360HipHop.com, plans to use artists such as Blige, Sean (Puffy) Combs and LL Cool J and actress Rosie Perez to appeal to the hip hop audience. This year, Simmons held a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Giuliani's rival when he was in the Senate race."
POST 6/1/2000
Rap Big Hip-hopping Mad At Hizzoner
By Kirsten Danis
Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons rapped Mayor Giuliani yesterday for quashing his plans to hold an event in City Hall Park - claiming Hizzoner wanted revenge after being mocked in an ad campaign. "It's scary how [Giuliani] can make these kinds of decisions - it's a public park," Simmons said after unveiling Rap the Vote 2000, a voter-registration drive, at a press conference he moved to a Midtown hotel. Simmons tweaks the mayor in ads for his Web site, 360HipHop.com., which feature a picture of a scowling, hulking Giuliani branded with the words, "I am not hip-hop." "I guess he didn't like that," Simmons said. The site is a sponsor of Rap the Vote 2000. Later, Simmons told The Post the mayor, who recently pledged to reach out to minorities, may have killed the event because he's not interested in promoting voter registration "in the hip-hop community.""We were denied access because the mayor didn't want those people in the park," Simmons said, referring to Public Advocate Mark Green, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and other speakers at the event"
Daily News 6/1/2000
The Old Rudy Snaps Back
Slams Door On Press Questions
About His Vow To Be KindBy Michael R. Blood
Where's the love, Rudy? Twelve days after dedicating the remainder of his second term to healing the city's racial wounds and lifting up the forgotten, Mayor Giuliani was a bit surly and short yesterday when asked about his reshaped mayoralty. What about his plans to reach out to minorities? "I'll describe that when I'm ready to describe it," he snapped at a City Hall news conference. Asked whether he had met with the family of Patrick Dorismond, a Brooklyn man killed in an NYPD drug sting gone awry, he said, "Why don't we move on to another question?" And at one point, he scolded reporters, "Why don't we make a pretense of being nice to each other?" Giuliani's remarks represented something of a turnaround from a more reflective, even-tempered demeanor he displayed since withdrawing from the Senate race May 19. In his speech pulling out of the campaign, the mayor talked in almost confessional terms and concluded, "There's room for improvement inside me ... as a person." He promised to "overcome, maybe, some of the barriers that maybe I placed there."
Daily News 6/1/2000
Execution Troubling George W.
By Corky Siemaszko
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who did not grant a reprieve to any of the 131 prisoners executed on his watch, said yesterday he might make an exception in the case of a killer fighting for new DNA tests. The Republican presidential candidate said he was "more than likely" to give a 30-day reprieve to Ricky McGinn, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection today for the rape and murder of his stepdaughter. "I want the man to have his full day in court," Bush said. "If there is any doubt, any outstanding evidence that exonerates him from the rape, we ought to look at it."
Bush's apparent softening on the death penalty comes as Texas' position as the nation's busiest execution state has become a campaign issue. Before yesterday, Bush had insisted that he was confident that every person on Texas' Death Row had a fair trial and was guilty...Bush said he would wait until McGinn had exhausted all of his appeals before acting. If he does grant McGinn a reprieve, it will be the first time he has done so during his five years in office."NY Times 5/31/2000
One of the real heroes of "Grass," Ron Mann's punchy and enjoyable new documentary on the history of marijuana in the United States during the 20th century, is Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York.
While Harry J. Anslinger, the federal government's first drug czar, spent his career looking for a way to pin as many evils on marijuana as he could, and punishing those who disagreed with him, La Guardia calmly commissioned a study on marijuana use. The study concluded that "the sociological, psychological and medical ills commonly attributed to marijuana have been exaggerated insofar as the City of New York is concerned." It's no wonder that an airport was named after him."
NY Times 11/17/98
Arrests Soar in Crackdown on Marijuana
Arrests on marijuana charges here have jumped to a record level this year, driven by the Giuliani administration's "zero tolerance" approach that has police officers pursuing anyone found possessing, selling or smoking even small amounts of marijuana. Law enforcement officials project that at the current pace, the New York City Police Department could arrest as many as 40,000 people by the end of the year on charges of possessing or selling marijuana. That would be eight times the number of arrests just six years ago.
But by the time the defendants were arraigned, several criminal defense lawyers said, their clients had already spent a half day or more in custody, being fingerprinted, strip-searched and checked for possible outstanding arrest warrants. "We call that doing your jail time up front," said Tony Elitcher, a staff lawyer with the Legal Aid Society's criminal defense division. "You are doing your sentence before you ever get in front of the judge."Daily News 5/7/2000
"Cops arrested 312 people for openly smoking pot during the Millennium Marijuana March in lower Manhattan yesterday, locking up nearly one-third of the demonstrators." 312 Arrested In Pot-March Bust
Newsday 5/25/2000
3rd Time Around
Bus Company Twice Escaped City Shutdownby Robert Polner and Dan Janison
The Giuliani administration balked at least twice at cracking down on a double-decker tour-bus company that it is now seeking to close amid outrage over the death of a soap opera actor who was struck by one of the sight-seeing buses Monday.
According to a former senior official in the city Department of Consumer Affairs, the mayor's office canceled a department announcement of a bill that, in effect, would have forced New York Apple Tours to modernize or replace its antique rolling stock to meet up-to-date pollution-control standards. The announcement was canceled two days before it was to be made, leaving department officials perplexed because several deputy mayors had sought the legislation in response to complaints about the bus company, said the former official, who is now is the private sector. "We weren't happy about it," said the ex-official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We never heard again, and didn't push it. When you're an official in this administration, you don't push too hard or you push yourself right out of a job." That isn't the only indication that the mayor's office may have run interference for New York Apple Tours.The head of the Department of Transportation's bus division, Maria Smith, was close to being demoted at the behest of City Hall after she sent a letter to the bus company last year prohibiting its buses from picking up tourists at a prime Times Square stop, according to two administration officials. In the Nov. 8, 1999, letter, which was the subject of a short article later that month in The New York Times, Smith pointed out that the company had been warned that "chronic violations of traffic rules" could lead to cancellation of its permit for the stop on Eighth Avenue between 46th and 47th streets. After the threat of cancellation was lifted, Smith was allowed to keep her position, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. She was unavailable for comment yesterday.
State Sen. Tom Duane (D-Manhattan) says the Giuliani administration has consistently refused to respond to his letters over several years alleging the misuse of residential streets by New York Apple Tours. The sight-seeing buses have long been the bane of his constituents, he said. "This administration knows how to make life miserable for all types of businesses and organizations it doesn't like, and could have done it-there was plenty of evidence of all kinds of quality-of-life problems," Duane said. "It obviously didn't have the will."
Buses of this age are no longer permitted in Europe, from where they were brought. Asked how New York Apple owner Hayim Grant became a contributor to Giuliani's now-aborted Senate race, the mayor's campaign director Bruce Teitelbaum said: "I have no idea."To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
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.Blue Collar Pundit Essays
Searching for the Breach in
Alice’s Looking Glass WorldMy America
Oh Say, Can You See?
FREEDOM!
War isn't Hell!
God is Starting to Scare Me!
It's All Part of the Plan!
Turning the World Wide Web Into
a Tower of Politically Sanitized BabelAnd by clicking here, you'll see an old suggestion (May 2003) of how Democrats could/should have protested the Republican convention and G.W. Bush.
This site is under construction
Contact: Jack Ballinger at: Pundit@BlueCollarPolitics.com
For a great source of general tenant information,
visit the Tenant Net Home Page |©2005 Baltech Productions. All rights reserved.
