Wednesday,
June 27, 2007
Getting a Grip on Giuliani
The
ANNOTICO Report
Giuliani often
answers the charge by accusing his detractors of ethnic bias as if “fascist” were somehow an
ethnic slur against Italian Americans.
Giuliani may be
reaping what he sowed. He is cavalier about Soprano and Mafioso
Stereotypes against Italian Americans, and even costumed in the apparel at
parties. Fascism is another Italian Negative Loaded term.
When you fight
Negative Italian Stereotypes, you fight them all, you don
Getting a Grip
|
Giuliani, Altar Boys & Weasels
|
The
American mass media calls him
When Giuliani
emerged from the dust of the
Before picking up
the hero moniker, Giuliani was commonly referred to in the city he
governed as a fascist and a thug. These accusations didnt just come from civil libertarians. Former New
York Mayor Ed Koch likened Giuliani to the former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet. According to Koch, Giuliani uses the levers of power to punish
any critic. Koch went on to explain, He doesnt
have that rightthats why the First Amendment is so important. ...
According to the New York Times, the Daily News and the New York Post, then attorney
general candidate Eliot Spitzer went on record in October 1998, saying,
the current Mayor thinks hes 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.
Spitzers
complaints,...stemmed from Giulianis zero tolerance policies, which
he argued would improve the quality of life in New York by addressing small
crimes such as jaywalking, drinking in public, marijuana possession and
panhandling, and non-crimes...Under this policy, New Yorkers were handcuffed
and dragged off to jail for 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. Eventually
almost 70,000 people sued the city for police abuses such as strip-searching
suspected jaywalkers. In 1999, James Savage, the president of the
The
hunting of altar boys
Giuliani shored
up control of the police department by appointing crony Howard Safir as commissioner. Safir then
enhanced the departments Street Crimes Unit into what
This is the
police unit that became notorious for shooting African immigrant Amadou Diallo 40 times as he
reached for his wallet after being ordered to show identification. When New
Yorkers took to the streets to protest the shooting, Giuliani told the press
that people were protesting due to their own personal inadequacies.
...
When Safir left, Giuliani appointed Bernard Kerik
to take his place. Kerik later plead guilty to
accepting gifts and loans from businesses with alleged crime ties while he
served as commissioner.
Little
weasels
By the time
September 11, 2001 rolled around, Giulianis approval rating, according to
a
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 of New York students
were forced to leave school and enter the menial workfare force, where less
than six percent of participants transition to real employment paying minimum
wage or more.
Mega real estate
developer Donald Trump described Giuliani as maybe the best [mayor]
ever. Ralph Nader called him the oligarchs mayor. Giuliani
took credit for a high-end real estate boom while presiding over double-digit
rises in homelessness, cutting public spending on affordable housing by nearly
half and housing for the homeless by nearly three quarters.
Today,
But was Giuliani
really the hero of the day?
On September 11
New York was left without an emergency command center because Giuliani, against
the advice of the police and fire departments, decided to locate the center in
the third World Trade Center building, above fuel tanks containing tens of
thousands of gallons of fuelthis despite a 1993 terrorist attempt to topple the
towers. It was this decision that put him on the street on September 11 instead
of inside a command center coordinating operations. Ironically, this decision
also put him in front of hundreds of press cameras, sparking his transformation
into iconic, dust-covered hero.
While our hero
was wandering the streets, however, there was no communication between the
police department, whose helicopter pilots determined that the towers were in
danger of collapsing, and the fire department, whose real heroes were rushing
into the towers. And there was no communication between the police officers who
identified an open stairway for escape from above the fire and the 911
operators who were telling soon-to-be-dead office workers to stay put and wait
for firefighters.
Whatever
possibility existed for communication between the police and fire departments,
whose radios operate on different frequencies, evaporated when Giuliani visited
a makeshift fire/police command center that formed in his absence and ordered
to police brass to leave and accompany him uptown. This effectively put the
fire department and police department leadership in different physical places
with no communication between them.
Arbeit macht
frei
A month after the
September 11 attacks, firefighters took to the streets to protest against
Giulianis decision to limit the number of uniformed firefighters and
police officers sifting through the rubble for remains. They accused the
administration of speeding up the cleanup at the cost of possibly discarding
the remains of victims. 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 that The
mayor fails to realize that
Giuliani often
answers the charge by accusing his detractors of ethnic biasas if
fascist were somehow an ethnic slur against Italian Americans. The
charge itself, however, stinks of anti-Italian-American ethnic bias, ignoring
the role
And you thought
George W. Bush was dangerous.
Dr. Michael
I. Nimans Artvoice articles are available at www.artvoice.com,
archived at www.mediastudy.com and available globally through syndication.
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