VULTURE RUDY! - McCain's Buddy Giuliani Exploiting the Crisis
Freedom Fighter
Rudy Giuliani's 'crass opportunism' reflects on McCain
Daily News
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/09/25/2008-09-25_rudy_giulianis_crass_opportunism_reflect.html
Friday, September 26th 2008
Rudy Giuliani is positioning his law firm to cash in on Wall Street's train
wreck - a move that has become a gift to political enemies of his pal John
McCain.
Even as the nation's $700 billion, taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailout was
still being hashed out, the former mayor announced Thursday his high-powered
law firm has set up a task force, its mission: to help corporate clients
get a piece of the action - or keep the federal wolves from the door.
"Our team of former government officials and experienced attorneys in
the fields of legislation, enforcement and finance are equipped to
guide institutions in this quickly evolving and complex environment,"
Giuliani noted in a press release from his law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani.
Giuliani is not the only one poised to profit from opportunities
created by the mega-meltdown, but he is the most politically famous.
Giuliani is a prime surrogate for Republican McCain, who has called
the economic meltdown "the greatest crisis since the end of World War
II" and has assailed Wall Street for "unbridled greed."
Democrats argued that Giuliani's latest business pitch reflected
poorly on the Arizona senator, a longtime friend who chose the former
mayor to give the keynote speech at the GOP convention.
"Bracewell & Giuliani's crass opportunism raises serious questions
about whether John McCain is comfortable with one of his most visible
campaign surrogates trying to cash in on what Alan Greenspan called a
once-in-a-century economic crisis," Democratic National Committee
spokesman Damien LaVera told the Daily News.
McCain campaign officials declined to comment.
The Republican National Committee accused Democrats of hypocrisy,
noting that Team Obama sent out a fund-raising letter last week that
attempted to exploit the current financial mess.
Members of Giuliani's task force will include a number of Bracewell &
Giuliani employees with deep connections to Washington in general and
the Bush White House in particular.
They include Marc Mukasey, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan
and the son of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
The elder Mukasey is one of Giuliani's closest friends and, as a
federal judge, swore in Giuliani at both his mayoral inaugurations.
Another task force member will be Robert Clarke, a one-time director
of the Resolution Trust Corp. - the government-owned outfit set up in
the wake the last major government bailout, the savings and loan
crisis of the 1980s, to sell off assets.
Bracewell & Giuliani spokeswoman Melanie Hillis declined to say how
much the firm would be charging.
Top-shelf firms like Bracewell & Giuliani routinely charge corporate
clients fees topping $800 an hour for every senior lawyer's time - or
a commission based on the value of transactions that could reach
billions of dollars.
dsalto...@nydailynews.com
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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 documented below, it is obvious
that if in a Federal government position Giuliani would interact with
Americans and 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 enjoyed bullying 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 sergeants 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 here, 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 have been 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." Are
we to believe such un-American, totalitarian conduct would not continue
should Giuliani be in a Federal cabinet position?
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,
former 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 firecrackersby the Asian-American
community for their New Years celebration, a religious and cultural
tradition, had been allowed. In1997 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 decorationsbecause 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 helicopters now
circle overhead and radio any fireworks sightings to their ground forces.
So much for "Independence" Day and the freedoms it stands for!
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."
Haitian 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 incriminating
evidence as quickly as possible. The steel, some claim bearing evidence of
demolition explosives, was quickly shipped to China and 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 would have less freedom, and the privileged "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.
RECOMMENDED READING: Giuliani: Nasty Man - by Edward I. Koch, former NYC
mayor.
Giuliani Time (DVD) - with David Dinkins, Ron Kuby, Wayne Barrett, Rudolph
W. Giuliani, Kevin Keating.
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 - by Wayne
Barrett and Dan Collins.
"Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend" can be viewed at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Erudy%2Durbanlegend%2Ec>
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