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GIULIANI: ENEMY OF FREEDOM!

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Freedom Fighter

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Jan 26, 2008, 4:33:08 PM1/26/08

GIULIANI: ENEMY OF AMERICAN FREEDOM!

Some media have called him "America's mayor," and it is through the
corporate media that most Americans have formed their opinions of Rudolph
Giuliani. Many citizens of the city he ruled over however label him a
dangerous fascist. Based on his history, as detailed below, it is obvious
that if elected Giuliani would rule America and interact with the world with
the same mean-spirited, brutal iron fist he became notorious for in New York
City.

The days of Giuliani's urban autocracy were marked by such abuses of power
as people being arrested - not just ticketed, but taken into police
custody - for such harmless or trivial violations as drinking beer in
public, leafleting, selling artwork, jaywalking, and "public speaking
without a demonstration permit," which is not a violation at all but
constitutionally protected free speech. And in the parks, people were
arrested for possession after buying pot from undercover cops!

As reported in the 1/14/98 Daily News, an 81-year-old Brooklyn widow
received five $100 tickets for the "illegal posting" of flyers to get work
to earn money to pay her medical bills.

Giuliani often bullied his victims directly. The 1/14/98 Daily News told of
Giuliani's persecution of a whistleblower. Cops in the Bronx had set up a
switchable red light ticket trap, $125 a ticket. One victim called
Giuliani's radio show to make him aware of this, but the scam continued. He
then videoed the cops working their trap and publicized it. The very day
the story hit the press, two police sargeants went to his home, handcuffed
him, and took him in
- for a 13-year-old unpaid ticket! The judge threw the case out, but
Giuliani was not yet done with him. He personally ordered the police to
publicize his "rap sheet," which slandered him as a sodomizer and burglar.
This was later proven untrue. Giuliani then stated that the ticket trap was
a "legitimate use of police resources," claiming the spot was a "death trap"
for accidents, and quoted statistics that were later shown mostly false.
Giuliani also stated to reporters: "Mr. --- was posing as an altruistic
whistle-blower; maybe he's dishonest enough to lie about police officers."
Mr. --- then suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized, and
later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. "It really
damaged me," said Mr. ---, now 60. "I thought I was doing something good -
my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me."

In New York City, for reasons as documented above, Giuliani was commonly
referred to as a despotic fascist and a mean-spirited thug. These
accusations didn't just come from civil libertarians either. Former New
York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani "uses the levers of power to punish
any critic." Koch went on to explain, "He doesn't have that right - that's
why the First Amendment is so important." Yes, and by the end of 2002 the
courts had found Giuliani in violation of that constitutional pillar of
American freedom twenty-seven times! More recently, Koch, author of the
book "Giuliani: Nasty Man," stated: "David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy
didn't cast our portraits onto a bonfire along with the First Amendment,
which he enjoyed violating daily."

More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his
administration for blocking free speech. In his book Speaking Freely, First
Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on doing the
one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of
government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself."

Giuliani's disdain for freedom of speech is best exemplified by the case of
Robert Lederman, an artist that drew caricatures of Giuliani as a dictator
and depicted his policies as transforming New York into a police state.
Lederman was ARRESTED FORTY-ONE TIMES during Giuliani's reign, not by street
cops but police brass under Giuliani's orders, for displaying his art at
political demonstrations and on the streets of New York. All were false
arrests, as Lederman was never convicted of a crime.

In a similar fashion and again in brazen violation of the First Amendment,
Giuliani ordered paid advertisements for New York Magazine removed from
public buses because the ads touted the magazine as "possibly the only good
thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani's response to
criticism thus often has proven it was highly justified.

According to the New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post, now
New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998,
saying, "the current Mayor thinks he's a dictator, and does not have
sufficient respect not only for other branches of government, but also for
the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."

Spitzer's statements, like Lederman's false arrests, stemmed from Giuliani's
totalitarian "zero tolerance" policies, which he claimed would improve the
"quality of life" in New York by punishing trivial violations such as
jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession, and panhandling, and
even non-violations such as Lederman's persistent expressions of free
speech. Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed and dragged off to
jail for peacefully drinking beer on their front stoops - the New York City
equivalent of hanging out on the porch. Marijuana possession arrests
increased by well over 4,000 percent. Arrests were even made for such
things as riding a bike without a bell on it and sitting on milk crates on
the sidewalk.

Giuliani's courtship of rogue police officers and seduction of the NYPD to
become his personal Gestapo began in September 1992, when he addressed an
angry rally of cops protesting then-mayor Dinkins's proposal for a civilian
board to review police misconduct.

It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty cops
drank heavily (a violation for which, under Giuliani, many citizens would
later be arrested), and a few waved signs like "Dump the Washroom
Attendant," a racist reference to mayor Dinkins. Twice, Giuliani called the
Dinkins proposal "bullshit." The crowd cheered, and Giuliani was jubilant.
"Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot," Mr. Dinkins stated.

As mayor, Giuliani's racial and ethnic biases and favoritisms were blatant.
For over a century the public use of firecrackers by the Asian-American
community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
tradition, had been allowed. In 1997 though Giuliani lined Chinatown
streets with hundreds of police to suppress this, and even refused to allow
a permit for a professionally supervised display. The Christian equivalent
of this would be banning Christmas trees and decorations because they
occasionally start fires. Giuliani never relented on this. On the Jewish
festival of Purim however, when fireworks are used in the streets of Jewish
neighborhoods, the police continued to look the other way! They also
ignored bonfires set in Jewish neighborhood streets to destroy leavened
bread before Passover. Can you imagine the police response to this in any
other community? Giuliani's lasting legacy is that in New York fireworks
are OK for one favored group on their holiday, but you cannot celebrate the
4th of July with them. On the birthday of America, police helicoptors now
circle overhead and radio any fireworks sightings to their ground forces.
So much for "Independence" Day!

Eventually almost 70,000 citizens sued the city for such police abuses as
strip-searching suspected jaywalkers. In 1999 James Savage, president of
the New York City police union, referred to Giuliani's zero tolerance policy
as "a blueprint for a police state and tyranny." Under the guise of fighting
crime, Giuliani had thus transformed the NYPD into his own private Gestapo,
going as far as assigning NYPD detectives, at taxpayer expense, as
round-the-clock bodyguards for his MISTRESS. This after his closing down
all the strip clubs on "moral grounds!"

Giuliani shored up control of the police department by appointing crony
Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then made the department's Street
Crimes Unit into what New York journalist Nat Hentoff described as a "rogue
operation" that made "Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." Fashion-wise,
the unit had a resemblance to Guatemala's notorious military death squads,
wearing "We Own the Night" t-shirts, and shirts citing Ernest Hemingway's
"There is no hunting like the hunting of man" quote - quite a variation from
standard issue uniforms!

This is the police unit that became notorious for shooting innocent African
immigrant Amadou Diallo FORTY TIMES as he reached for his wallet after being
ordered to show identification. When New Yorkers took to the streets to
protest this unjustified killing, Giuliani told the press that people were
protesting due to "their own personal inadequacies."

Hatian immigrant Abner Louima, arrested in 1997 on a minor charge, was
brutally beaten on the trip to Brooklyn's 70th precinct. There officers
took him into a bathroom where convicted rogue cop Justin Volpe sadistically
shoved a plunger handle up Louima's rectum, then forced the same object into
his mouth, breaking his teeth. Louima was hospitalized with serious
injuries, and stated that during his torture one of these sadists said to
him "THIS IS GIULIANI TIME!"

When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik to take his place. This
is the man Giuliani also recommended to head up Homeland Security. Kerik
later pleaded guilty to accepting gifts and loans from businesses with
alleged organized crime ties while he served as police commissioner, and now
faces additional criminal charges.

Some credit Giuliani's Draconian excesses with the drop in crime during his
tenure, but as on 9/11, he just happened to be in the right place at the
right time to take the credit. During this period crime dropped similarly
nationwide, mostly the result of changing demographics and better policing
methods.

Eventually the Giuliani-sanctioned anything-goes extremism infected other
NYPD units. When plainclothes cops asked a black man on the street to sell
them marijuana, the man, Patrick Dorismond, took offense to being called a
drug dealer and got into a scuffle with the unidentified officers, who then
SHOT HIM DEAD. Giuliani issued a knee-jerk defense of the killer cops,
telling the press that Dorismond was "no altar boy." Salon.com pointed out
that in fact he WAS an altar boy! Desperate to justify the killing,
Giuliani ordered the ILLEGAL release of Dorismond's sealed juvenile record -
for disorderly conduct! It seems that under Giuliani, this justifies the
death penalty. Giuliani's contribution to Dorismond's funeral was a
squadron of police in full riot gear, inciting violence that would not have
occurred without their unnecessary and disrespectful presence.

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.

As of 2001, Giuliani's approval rating, according to a Quinnipiac University
poll, had hit a Bush-like 37 percent. In desperation, he got downright
weird, proposing a Taliban-style "decency panel," operated out of his
office, that would have the power to determine what would be considered
"art" in New York City. This came after the debacle of Giuliani's failed
attempt to cut public funding for the Brooklyn Museum because he considered
art on exhibit there to be offensive. He also began having nightclubs
lacking a cabaret license raided by the police for allowing patrons to
dance. And early in 2001 he ordered a city-wide ban on pet ferrets,
claiming there was something "deranged" about opponents of the ban, and that
"excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness."

Desperate to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani seized upon any and
every opportunity to appear the "hero" (this was before 9/11, which gave him
the opportunity he sought and exploited to the hilt). Despite demanding a
crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.

Giuliani's perhaps most criminally negligent if not malevolent pretense to
heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as an
impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
solution. His solution was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has
caused and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11
assurances that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had the entire
city repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic
insecticide, and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety
precautions in doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to prove
in such environmental poisoning cases than when the police are ordered to
falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged to torture suspects or shoot
them to death.

Giuliani himself was actually responsible for the alleged West Nile Virus
threat. He had disbanded New York's Pest Control Unit, whose job was to
find and eradicate pools of stagnant water where mosquitoes breed. Thus he
set the stage for his "heroic" response to this "crisis."

Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead or dying therefrom,
former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground Zero
workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts, and also
that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned with its
image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the wake of
the subsequent anthrax scare.

Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000,
and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical terrorism.
"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now,"
Mr. Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who
micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational character trait and picks
fights just to score points. He's the last thing this country needs as
president." Hauer also accused Giuliani of failing to sort out turf battles
between the city's police and fire departments, and of appointing
inexperienced cronies to key positions.

Pet ferrets weren't the only ones to get the boot in Giuliani's New York.
Hizzoner boasted of moving people from welfare to workfare, where thousands
of people earned less than two dollars per hour replacing an equivalent
number of parks department employees whose positions were downsized. During
this period, 13,000 welfare-dependent City University students were FORCED
TO LEAVE COLLEGE and enter the menial workfare force, where less than six
percent of participants transition to real employment paying minimum wage or
more.

A month after the September 11th disaster, firefighters took to the streets
to protest Giuliani's decision to limit the number of uniformed firefighters
and police officers sifting through the rubble for remains, and the "scoop
and dump" haste of the cleanup. They accused the administration of rushing
the cleanup at the cost of trashing the remains of victims. [And, it is
pointed out by 9/11 conspiracy theorists, to dispose of any incriminating
evidence as quickly as possible. The steel, some claim bearing evidence of
demolition explosives, was shipped to China and quickly melted down.] At
the firefighters' demonstration, Giuliani, in signature style, ordered Peter
Gorman, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, and Kevin
Gallagher, head of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, to be ARRESTED at
the protest site! A spokesperson for Gallagher told the media "The mayor
fails to realize that New York City is not a dictatorship." Gorman went a
step further, joining hordes of New Yorkers calling the mayor a "fascist" -
which brings us back to the fascistic conduct issue that dogged Giuliani
throughout his mayoral tenure.

Giuliani often answers the charge by accusing his detractors of ethnic
bias - as if "fascist" were somehow an ethnic slur against
Italian-Americans. His charge itself, however, reeks of
anti-Italian-American ethnic bias, ignoring the role New York's
Italian-American community has played in local politics - giving the city,
for example, its most revered mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. The fascist
charges do not stem from Giuliani's ethnicity, they stem from his own
actions and statements, such as:

" - 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.

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."

At reason.com/blog, one finds a statement by David Weigel regarding
Giuliani:

"This is the cornerstone of his philosophy: For liberty to thrive, you need
to dramatically empower the state and the legal system. Criminals and
would-be criminals should have less freedom in order for the rest of us to
enjoy our freedoms. This is the framework he's applied to basically every
issue - "

Who, we must ask, are the "would-be criminals?" Obviously ALL OF US, as at
one time or another everyone knowingly or unknowingly commits a violation
such as jaywalking, speeding, or drinking in public. So under Giuliani's
rule we ALL have less freedom, and the priveleged "rest of us" are those
that rule over us, the "dramatically empowered" state. Does this sound like
something out of Mein Kampf?

When the lessons of history are ignored, history repeats.

Compare the following to the above Giuliani "Freedom" quote:
"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.

And an old but relevant news story:
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.