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NY Times 5/2/2000 on
../giuliani/Hitler Analogyby Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
May 2, 2000My compliments to Clyde Haberman for daring to buck the new "hands-off Saint Giuliani the brave cancer victim" hysteria that is being religiously observed by virtually every reporter in NYC. [NY Times 5/2/2000 Reich-Baiting: Even Mayor Can't Resist by Clyde Haberman]. That said, allow me to make a distinction between making spurious analogies such as, "When that cop gave me a summons for having my dog off its leash it made me feel like I was in Nazi Germany", and the quite literal association between New York City's 107th Mayor and the Third Reich.
As the artist-originator of much of the Giuliani-as-Hitler art and commentary that Mr. Haberman describes in his cocolumn I continue to be amazamazed at just how many real connections there are between Giuliani's policies, his ideology, his advisors and Nazi Germany. To list just three outstanding examples aside from the ones Mr. Haberman notes in his column:
[Note: quotations to back up many of these statements are included at the end of this essay]
- 1. The Mayor is proud to admit that virtually all of his policy ideas originated with the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank founded by President Reagan's CIA chief William Casey. Before starting the Institute Mr. Casey was instrumental in bringing former high-level Nazi officers to the U.S. following WWII and installing them in the military, in think tanks and in universities across America as part of the cold war effort to stop Communism.
Among the Manhattan Institute's best known resident scholars is Charles Murray the author of the Bell Curve, an influential book which advances the ideas of Eugenics-specifically the idea that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites. Mr. Murray wrote the Bell Curve during his eight years as an intellectual star on the Manhattan Institute's staff. During that time his work was generously financed by the Pioneer Fund, an extreme right wing fund that promotes the ideas of Eugenics and whose founder, Wickliff Draper, was an outspoken supporter of both Adolf Hitler and of Eugenics. The Draper estate which started the fund is also a major player in the U.S. military-industrial complex, being the largest stockholder in Rockwell International.
For rather obvious public relations reasons the Manhattan Institute has attempted to distance themselves from Murray in recent years, yet most of their advocacy continues to be obsessively preoccupied with these same ideas as they relate to race relations, affirmative action, eliminating welfare, birthrates among minorities, getting rid of the homeless, counter-insurgency in relation to social unrest within the inner-cities, overpopulation, unwed mothers and crime. Anyone who thinks the Mayor is merely insensitive to Black and Latino New Yorkers needs to read the Bell Curve. Then they will understand that his problem is not in having a bad attitude but in being a proponent of a bad ideology.
The Manhattan Institute's link to Hitler is not limited to its connection to Charles Murray or to William Casey. The main funder of the Manhattan Institute is the Rockefeller family's Chase Manhattan Bank. Chase has been forced to admit that both before and during WWII they were intimately involved in facilitating Hitler's rise to power. Among their many efforts to aid the Furhrer was turning over gold reserves hidden in their vaults belonging to European nations which Hitler had invaded, changing billions of dollars in foreign currency into Deutsche marks in order to make them usable by the Nazi government and liquidating the bank accounts of thousands of Jews before even being requested to do so by Hitler. Many historians doubt that Hitler could have financed his war machine without the help of Chase Bank-the prime funder of Rudy Giuliani's favorite think tank-who proudly advertise their motto as, "Chase: The Right Relationship Is Everything". One might also note a curious similarity between their logo and the swastika.
- 2. The Mayor has endorsed GW Bush for President and has a long association with the Bush family-which itself has a notorious historical connection to Adolf Hitler. Giuliani was the number three official in the Justice Department during the Reagan/Bush administration. Many political observers believe Giuliani expects to be appointed U.S. Attorney General if Bush wins the presidency rather than being a U.S. Senator. Some even theorize that going public with his prostate cancer may have been a clever three-pronged strategy timed to simultaneously force Donna Hanover to drop out of the Vagina Monologues, silence his critics with guilt about attacking a cancer victim and to give him a face-saving way not to run for the Senate.
GW Bush's grandfather was Prescott Bush, who later served as a U.S. Senator. Prescott's fortune and political connections established the Bush financial and political dynasty. During the twenties and thirties Bush was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, where he helped set up and operate financial and shipping institutions that functioned as fronts for the Nazis. In 1942 as the U.S. entered WWII Congress seized many of their assets in order to prevent them from further aiding Hitler.
The Harriman and Rockefeller fortunes were the financial basis for the U.S. Eugenics movement, beginning with the Cold Springs Harbor Eugenics Record Office in 1904. Today that same facility is the home of the Human Genome Project, the latest incarnation of Eugenics "science". Hitler publicly stated that he modeled the Nazi's Nuremburg laws on the Eugenics laws of the U.S. Adolf Hitler awarded the highest German civilian honors to American proponents of Eugenics, among them Henry Ford. At their trials a number of top Nazi war criminals used the defense that the U.S. government had been enacting very similar policies to those behind the German Holocaust. If one examines American Eugenics literature from the 1920's and 1930's, it is as filled with anti-Semitism and anti-Black rhetoric as anything written by the Nazis or the KKK.
By the 1930's more than 24 States in the U.S. had begun forcible sterilization of so-called mental defectives, many of whom were completely normal. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sterilized at the same time Hitler was sterilizing and euthanizing "undesirables"in Germany. During the 1930's many States considered even more extreme Eugenics laws which if passed would have mandated the sterilization and euthanizing of criminals, the mentally ill and the chronically sick as an economic savings to the State (for the NYC 2000 version think chronic fare-beaters, homeless people, and AIDs patients). If the Holocaust hadn't given Eugenics such a bad name those policies would have been the law today and they are still being very actively pursued under different guises by Giuliani and Co.
(Click here to see my essay on Eugenics.)If you think Giuliani wants everyone's DNA just to solve crimes, think again. The role DNA technology will play in the future development of Eugenics as a system of social control will be similar to what Microsoft Windows has done for computing. It's worth noting that during the years of GW Bush's term as Governor of Texas, the "compassionate conservative"signed the death warrants for more than half of all persons executed in the U.S. According to a Dallas Morning Star article I discovered on the Manhattan Institute's own website, MI first invented the doublespeak ideology and then coached playboy GW Bush into portraying his newfound image as a "compassionate conservative".
- 3. At the height of racial tensions in NYC last year Mayor Giuliani chose to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday not by attending one of the many public events sponsored by Black churches or civic associations but by dining and posing for photos with Joerg Haider, Austria's notorious head of the far right anti-immigrant Freedom Party. Haider's parents were members of the Nazi S.S. and he has publicly praised both Hitler's employment policies (remember Giuliani's workfare-Work Shall Make You Free program) and the SS itself. Hitler had planned to depopulate much of Africa and Eastern Europe along with exterminating the Jewish people. Among the very first targets of Hitler's racial policies were the mixed race offspring of Germans and Black Africans.
Haider, one of Austria's wealthiest citizens, lives on an estate confiscated by the Nazis from a Jewish family before they were sent to the death camps. After the controversy erupted Giuliani falsely claimed he didn't know who Haider was despite the fact that Haider was guarded at the King Day celebration by his very own NYPD security contingent. Previous to that event Giuliani had been lobbied by Jewish leaders in Brooklyn to prevent Haider from running through their neighborhood during the 1999 NYC Marathon.
Giuliani refused to alter the course of the race and instead provided Haider with a contingent of undercover NYPD officers to jog with and protect him the entire route of the Marathon. The King Day celebration had been organized by one of Giuliani's few Black supporters, arch-conservative Roy Innis of C.O.R.E., who only weeks earlier held a panel discussion on Haider's neo-Nazi connection. Like the King Day event, this panel discussion was also sponsored by C.O.R.E.The connections between Giuliani and the proponents of extreme right wing ideologies are legion. One of Giuliani's main advisors is Rockefeller protege Henry Kissenger, who was also the driving force behind many of Nixon's most repressive and Machiavellian ideas. Giuliani's 20 million dollar campaign war chest was acquired by using out of State fund-raising lists rented from the most extreme elements of the far right. Giuliani is seeking the Independence Parties' endorsement, which will place him very comfortably on the same ticket as Pat Buchannan, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler.
Anti-Communism, which along with anti-Semitism was the driving force behind the Nazi's political campaign to rule Germany, is very much a feature of Giuliani's mindset to this day, despite the fact that world Communism collapsed before Giuliani ever became Mayor. His campaign fund-raising efforts against Hillary Clinton are almost entirely based on bizzare claims by the Mayor that she is an agent of the far-left who intends to institute a Communist system in the U.S.
Giuliani routinely accuses his critics-be they homeless advocates, community gardeners or Democratic Party elected officials-of being Communists. Only yesterday (5/1/2000) the "softer, more human Giuliani" everyone is lavishing praise on, mounted a massive police crackdown on a May Day rally by union members and immigration advocates, resulting in 19 arrests. According to the 5/2/2000 Daily News, the thousand or so marchers were greeted by 2000 cops in riot gear, many of whom carried tear gas.
It's reasonable for skeptics to ask, "If all this is true why doesn't the media cover it in depth?" The answer is simple. The corporate interests which both own and are the main advertisers of the mainstream media have a well-documented love affair with Nazism themselves. Besides the intimate connection between Chase Bank and Hitler noted above, more than 50 major U.S. corporations have admitted to using Jewish slave labor to run the German branches of their factories during WWII and to having reaped extra profits from this practice. They include such household names as Ford, GM, Chrysler, Bayer, Exxon-Mobil and Kodak.
If you find yourself incarcerated in a U.S. prison during the next few years you may end up working on a production line for some of these same corporations as part of the developing, military-prison-industrial complex. Bringing the Rockefeller/Manhattan Institute/Eugenics connection full circle, it's interesting to note that a major portion of the million-plus inmates in U.S. prisons today are there solely thanks to the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Need I add that the CIA, originators of the Manhattan Institute, has been implicated in the drug trade numerous times both here and abroad.This upcoming election is-to use a term beloved by our Freudian inclined Mayor-the return of the repressed. After totally defeating the Nazis in WWII we find ourselves in year 2000 facing the prospect of: 1. a Republican president with extensive family ties to Hitler and fascism; 2. a Mayor now sainted beyond criticism due to illness who will possibly become the next U.S. Attorney General and whose ideas originate in a Nazi-inspired think tank funded by Hitler's favorite lending institution 3. The possibility that Giuliani will run on a ticket with Pat Buchannan a Hitler admirer, and 4. facing the prospect of an entire world society dominated by the ideology and technology of human, plant and animal Eugenics, the source of Hitler's most racist ideas and of the Holocaust itself.
N.Y. Times 12/17/98
Giuliani Backs DNA Testing
of Newborns for IdentificationWhen asked whether all children should have DNA tests at birth, the Mayor said: "...I would have no problem with that, or fingerprinting all children...There is absolutely no reason why people should be afraid of being identified...It's not invasive"
Daily News 12/24/98
Chase Named In Holocaust-Asset Suit
...Chase's Paris branch - with full backing of its New York office - displayed "excessive zeal" in enforcing anti-Jewish laws and was held in "very special esteem" by Vichy authorities.
Daily News 2/23/2000
Chase Apologizes For Doing Biz With Nazis
Chase Manhattan Corp. apologized yesterday for aiding Adolf Hitler's Third Reich by converting German marks into U.S. dollars between 1936 and 1941. Because many countries refused to accept German currency during the war, the Nazis used foreign banks like Chase National to change the currency into money that would be accepted. "We are sad to learn and deeply troubled about the involvement of one of our predecessor banks in a program that benefited Germany during that period,"said William Harrison Jr., chief executive officer of Chase.
"We have a responsibility to make this information public and wish to express our sincere apologies to the Jewish community and to the American public." Chase does not, however, intend to make financial reparations for the role it played in aiding Hitler and the Nazis.
NY Times 4/29/2000
A Fund Is Planned by U.S. Companies for Nazis' Victims
At least 50 American companies operated factories in Germany during the years that the Nazis were in power, which began in 1933. American companies continued doing business in Germany after war broke out in 1939. Some remained there until late 1941, when the United States entered the war. The German government then nationalized most such factories, but they were returned -- sometimes badly damaged, in other cases improved -- just after the war. Some companies received dividends from their German operations that were paid when the war ended. Others were spared considerable expense restarting their German factories because slave labor had been used to keep the plants in working order...Ford, General Motors, Exxon-Mobil and Kodak are among a growing number of American multinationals that say they have found evidence that their subsidiaries used forced labor during those years.
The Dallas Morning Star 4/16/2000
The Godfathers of
'Compassionate Conservatism';
Authors' Works Have Helped Shape
Candidate Bush's Core PhilosophyWhen Myron Magnet sat on the couch with George W. Bush three years ago, he had a feeling that the Texas governor had finally found the philosophy he was looking for. The writer had been invited to Austin by Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's longtime political strategist. The idea was for the Manhattan-based Mr. Magnet to lecture the governor and his staff on his theory that less government was better government.
Mr. Magnet has been instrumental in shaping the bedrock of Mr. Bush's public policies - something the leading GOP presidential contender describes with the catch phrase "compassionate conservatism.
NY Times Monday, May 12, 1997
Turning Intellect Into Influence
Promoting Its Ideas,
the Manhattan Institute Has Nudged
New York RightwardIt was an early proponent of shrinking city government; it enabled Charles Murray to publish the 1984 book that many people believe begat welfare reform, and it promoted theories about crime and public disorder that later underlay the work of the former Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton.
It took up the question of the quality of life in New York City in 1990, well before Mr. Giuliani made that a cornerstone of his successful election campaign in 1993. The institute has savaged open admissions al the City University of New York, pushed hospital privatization and aggressively promoted school choice. Now, its critique of rent control is helping to inform State Senator Joseph L. Bruno's move to phase out rent regulations, and its proposal for charter schools is circulating through legislative offices in Albany...the institute was founded as a free-market education and research organization by William Casey, who then went off to head the Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan Administration...Mr. Giuliani and his campaign staff began meeting with institute members in 1992, and since that time have absorbed many of its ideas, particularly on such issues as the city's tax structure, economic development, education policy, policing and quality of life.
Boston Sunday Globe, 2/22/98
Giuliani's communications director,
Crystine Lategano, said:"The mayor has a very close working
relationship with the Manhattan Institute,"
NY Observer 1/31/2000
Right-Wing Southerner
Is Rudy's Secret Weapon
in Senate CampaignAmong the organizations whose mailing lists the Giuliani campaign has rented from Response Unlimited are the American Center for Legislative Reform, which apparently believes that blue-helmeted United Nations troops will soon replace rangers at Yellowstone National Park; the Catholic Alliance, an anti-abortion offshoot of the Christian Coalition; and the American Patriot Donors, which opposes gay rights.
Richard Viguerie, the controversial right-wing direct-mail magnate, was enlisted by Giuliani operatives to arrange for the list rental, according to a source familiar with the transaction. The Observer first reported Mr. Viguerie's role with the Giuliani campaign in its on-line edition on Jan. 21. Mr. Viguerie would seem to be an unlikely supporter of Mr. Giuliani. A leading right-wing warrior, he has worked for Jesse Helms, Oliver North, George Wallace and Patrick Buchanan...Mr. Viguerie's conservative credentials, however, are impeccable.
His best direct-mail work stirs horrifying images of a left-wing takeover of the Federal Government. His marketing strategies helped launch the conservative revolution in the early 1960's, when he did mass mailings for Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. He raised cash for Wallace in the early 1970's, and helped organize Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1980's. He threw his direct-mail empire behind Mr. North, an insurgent candidate for Senate in Virginia, in 1994.
Meanwhile, the Giuliani campaign has rented a list of 6,000 names from English Language Advocates, a group that drafted a controversial initiative to make Arizona an English-only state, the group's development director, Phillips Hinch, told The Observer. The Mayor's campaign also has enlisted other right-leaning list companies. According to campaign finance records, the campaign hired the Virginia-based RST Marketing, which is raising money for Gary Bauer.
And the campaign has paid for the services of Pinnacle List Company, which offers...names of those who have donated to "U.S. Border Control,"a group whose Web site warns darkly of "the ethnic cleansing of European Americans."
Village Voice 2/29/2000
NEVER AGAIN
The History of American Eugenics Is Explored Online "A century ago, scientists from the top universities in America began to study people's pedigrees in the hopes of creating "perfect"children. Instead, they spawned a monster: the pseudoscience of eugenics. We bury memories of those days under a mountain of shame; rarely does the full scope of our flirtation with race science come to light.
In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was set up at Cold Spring Harbor, making the lab the center of what became an international movement. In the United States, the results ranged from "Fitter Families"contests, aimed at encouraging people of "good stock"to breed, to laws restricting immigration of non-WASPs and ordering sterilization of the "feebleminded."Arguing for limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Harry Laughlin, head of the ERO, told Congress in 1920, "We in this country have been so imbued with the idea of democracy or the equality of all men that we have left out of consideration the matter of blood or natural inborn hereditary mental and moral differences." Adolf Hitler, of course, took the same logic to pathological conclusions, using eugenics as a rationale for genocide.
Micklos, the site's editor, doesn't mince words about the American involvement in eugenics. In one essay, he describes the ERO's journal Eugenical News as the "dominant mouthpiece for the racist and anti-immigration agenda of eugenics research." The digital archive serves as a reminder that crackpot science isn't just the domain of Nazis and ignorant racists.
The ERO itself was endowed by a grant from the widow of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, and such population-control progressives as Margaret Sanger also believed in the cause.
Micklos and his team say they want to ensure that genetics research like the Human Genome Project doesn't get transmogrified. Today's breakthroughs in, say, prenatal screening would have been embraced by eugenicists, and there's always a group of people who will subscribe to racial-inferiority theories like those in The Bell Curve.
Margaret Sanger
The Eugenic Value of
Birth Control Propaganda.Birth Control Review, Oct. 1921, Vol. V, No. 10, page 5:
Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.
As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the "unfit"and the "fit,"admittedly the greatest present menace to the human race, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between the two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective.
Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.
NY Times 5/2/2000
Reich-Baiting: Even Mayor Can't Resist
by Clyde Haberman
An interesting twist to this political spat is that it is usually the Mayor who ends up on the recieving end of over-the-top Nazi imagry. Understandably, he has not liked it one bit. Protesters have carried placards caricaturing him with a Hitler mostache. His emergency crisis center downtown has been derided as his bunker. Comparisons between him and the Third Reich are amply suggested in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
NY Post Editorial 6/16/98
We'll say it simply: Just because people don't like Rudy Giuliani doesn't give them license to compare him to Adolf Hitler. The Hitler analogy is something that seems to amuse many people in this city. Cutesy stories have been written and published in the past week about an art installation on Madison Avenue called No York in which the mayor is depicted with a Hitler moustache. This image was first bandied about by an obnoxious twerp who claims to represent a group called A.R.T.I.S.T. - but which really ought to be called M.O.R.O.N. - ...As the New York Times' gleeful seizure of the "bunker"story indicates, you don't have to be a cabbie, a vendor or a M.O.R.O.N. to issue forth such repulsive opinions.
Jewish Week 5/7/99
His Artwork Raises A Fuehrer
In a vastly unpopular view even among some of the mayor's staunchest public critics, Lederman insists the Hitler comparison is not hyperbolic.
The signs, which Lederman distributed to the protestors, were panned by Jewish leaders.
Norman Siegel, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and one of Giuliani's most persistent critics, calls that view baseless and "irresponsible"and the Hitler comparison "repugnant."Giuliani, Siegel says, "has a terrible civil liberties record and he's bad on race relations, but there's absolutely no comparison to Adolf Hitler. Not even close. People who do that trivialize what Hitler was."
Such statements lead Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, to believe that Lederman "doesn't begin to understand what Hitler represents and what his plan was and what the Final Solution is all about, or what price the Jewish people paid for Hitler.
NY Post 11/6/99
On Thursday Haider took part in a discussion in Manhattan with about 40 leaders "from all religions,"and members of the black community and immigrants rights groups at the invitation of Roy Innis of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality in New York. Haider: I'm A Runner,
Not A Goosestepper
"A minority of the people left the meeting feeling he was a neo-Nazi, a larger percentage left feeling he was not, but the overwhelming majority feel the jury is still out," CORE spokesman Niger Innis said yesterday.
NY Post 11/5/99
A Marathon Man's Answer
To The NaziHow would Fred Lebow, the late founder of the New York City Marathon, have handled the prospect of Joerg Haider, the Austrian neo-Nazi parliamentarian, running in Sunday's race? Some Jews urged the marathon [Chase Bank was the #1 sponsor of the event] either to disqualify Haider or to re-route the race to avoid passing the Hasidic community's turf along Brooklyn's Bedford Avenue, where many Holocaust survivors and their families reside.
NY Times 2/2/2000
Giuliani Ventures Into Foreign Policy
Mr. Giuliani admitted shaking hands with Mr. Haider but said that he did not realize who Mr. Haider was and that if he had, he might not have gone to the dinner.
News accounts of the dinner, which was sponsored by the Coalition for Racial Equality, reported that the group's national chairman, Roy Innis, introduced Mr. Haider on the dais and referred specifically to his reputation of right-wing notoriety. Mr. Haider, the leader of the anti-immigration Freedom Party in Austria, stirred controversy in the 1990's by praising Hitler's "orderly employment policy," and describing veterans of elite Nazi SS troops as "men of character".
NEW YORK 1/19/2000 (AP)
Giuliani Criticized by Koch
Former Mayor Ed Koch criticized Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday for sharing a dais at a Martin Luther King Day event with an Austrian political leader who once praised the policies of Adolf Hitler. "Is that a place to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, to be on the same dais as the leader of the neo-Nazi Party in Austria?" Koch said at a news conference. "Why didn't he denounce Joerg Haider? Why didn't he order Joerg Haider out of the hall?" Giuliani and Haider, the leader of Austria's anti-immigrant Freedom Party, sat with about 80 others at a dinner Monday night given by the Congress of Racial Equality, which is led by conservative black activist Roy Innis.
NY Post 2/4/2000
Hill's Campaign Boss May Be
Mulling Race Of His OwnHenry Kissinger's private lunch with Mayor Giuliani in City Hall this week was just the latest in a series of talks that Rudy has been holding with bigwig policy makers.
NY Times 4/8/2000
Demonstrators of Old Spread Their
Message in a New Era of ProtestRobert Lederman, 49, a street artist who has protested for years against Mayor Giuliani's policies, often arrives with dozens of placards caricaturing the mayor as Hitler, complete with the Fuhrer's mustache.
Newsweek 4/5/99
Rudy on the Record Question
Newsweek: "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.
Daily News 5/2/2000
Fear of Unrest Puts
Police on High AlertThe New York City Police Department put on a massive show of force yesterday to combat a rumored spate of Seattle-style anti-capitalism protests, but the threatened street violence never erupted. Police brass, acting on tips and Internet postings, believed that anarchists who helped disrupt financial meetings in Seattle and Washington, D.C., in November planned to create chaos in Manhattan.
The department sent about 2,000 officers, many clad in riot gear, swarming into the Financial District and other parts of Manhattan. Officers arrested 19 self-proclaimed anarchists who crashed an immigration-rights rally at Union Square. They arrested the demonstrators on charges of disorderly conduct, assault and violating an obscure 1845 state law barring masked gatherings. There was no significant vandalism or violence, although police reported some minor property damage at two Starbucks and the Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters.
Cops credited the show of force and the creative use of the mask law with thwarting violence before it could start. "They didn't know about that law, and we collared them up before they got a chance to do their stuff,"a police official said. Police went on alert after eying several Web sites affiliated with recent World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and Washington. The sites called for protests at Times Square and Jersey City's Liberty State Park and a vague reference to a "guerrilla gardening action"at unknownTo 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.
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