Guiliani 'the hero' coming to Cork

cork | anti-war / imperialism | news report Thursday September 04, 2003 10:53 by NewsInfo

War loving, racist and a bad, bad boy

911 Mayor and Zero tolerance guru Rudolph Giuliani will be speaking at the MBAAI 'leadership conference' at the Silver Springs Moran Hotel, Tivoli, Cork on FRIDAY SEPT. 19.

Tickets MBAAI 01-2074456

http://www.counterpunch.org/tristam01152003.html
Triumphal Parallels in Command Time
>From Rudy Guiliani to George W. Bush
by PIERRE TRISTAM

Giuliani's New York had a blind spot for that recurrent disease of cowboy
police forces--the superiority complex. by Pierre Tristam After he was
kicked, punched and sodomized with a broomstick by two of New York City's
"finest" at a Brooklyn police precinct in 1997, Abner Louima told a story.

As the officers terrorized him, he said, they chanted how it was "Giuliani
time, not Dinkins time," a reference to Rudolph Giuliani, then at the end of
his first of two triumphalist terms as mayor, after the disastrous
administration of David Dinkins.

Louima sued, and two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center he
reached an $8.75 million settlement with the city and the Patrolmen's
Benevolent Association.

By then he had admitted that he made up the "Giuliani time" remark. But made
up or not, the remark had to be invented. It summed up Giuliani's faintly
fascist regime of martial policing that had given New York the feel of a
secure perimeter rather than a freewheeling city, so that even the New York
Times called him the "Mussolini of Manhattan" in a headline a few months
after his reelection, when, DiCaprio-style, he'd yelled "I am the king of
the world" to television cameras. He kicked off a new round of Little Hitler
jokes when he announced plans for a $15 million bombproof "emergency control
center" on--where else, the 23rd floor of the World Trade Center.

By then the NYPD's "stop & frisk" tactic had become an endemic and racist
harassment tool--175,000 cases in a 15-month period about the time of the
attack on Louima, with blacks and Hispanics overwhelmingly targeted (Louima
is a Haitian black).

There was the guy shot dead while arguing about a fender bender on a city
bridge, the guy dragged out of his bedroom at gunpoint, the guy shot dead in
the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked, all shot by cops, all part of
3,500 lesser-known Giuliani Time police misconduct cases--the ones that led
to lawsuits, anyway--which, cumulatively, cost New York City taxpayers $177
million in settlements over eight years.

Giuliani's New York, "where our life is secure and dignity is preserved," in
the words of an NYPD video, had a blind spot for that recurrent disease of
cowboy police forces--the superiority complex. At Giuliani's command, who
truly thought himself Mayor of the World well before Time Magazine crowned
him as such, the NYPD's superiority complex was bound to be bloody.
Giuliani's metamorphosis after Sept. 11 was truly great, and as Newsweek put
it recently, "Rudy Giuliani found his voice" that day. But for too many New
Yorkers, it was eight years late.

None of this should be too relevant now except for city historians. Giuliani
is out of power. He's finally harmless. Yet it is too relevant for comfort,
because it's hard not to see close parallels between Giuliani and President
Bush, two men who've been feeding off of each other's blood-born popularity
ever since that horrible day, which they continue to use and abuse to their
political advantage with buzzard-like rapacity. There are disturbing
parallels between Giuliani's brown-shirt rule before Sept. 11 and Bush's
since, between Giuliani's revanchist reign over New York and Bush's avenging
foreign policy, between Giuliani's shoot-first mentality and Bush's contempt
for doubt, between the once-Mayor of the World and the would-be King of the
World. New York City before Sept. 11 is the United States since then:
Suspicious, arbitrary, discriminating, secretive, and policing above all,
but mostly above the law.

What this means for the armed forces as they campaign and rampage through
foreign lands for no better reason than because the president has a hunch
that safety in Iowa or Flagler Beach lies in obliterating many thousand
souls seven time zones away isn't clear yet, if entirely unreassuring. What
it has already meant for the country is very clear. Giuliani Time has
yielded to Bush Time.

And for a crowning parallel, Bush has given the nation its own "emergency
control center." It is proportionally more expensive, more lumbering and
more useless than the one Giuliani put on the 23rd floor of the World Trade
Center. Calling it the Department of Homeland Security even gives it that
brown-shirt tint the Giuliani-Bush school of security designers are so fond
of. After greeting its inception with a season of derision back in 1998, the
press politely kept its ironists' mouths shut when the original command
center ended up at New York's Fresh Kills dump, along with other remains
from Ground Zero. Mouths are unfortunately still mostly shut about the new
department and most other Bush-born crocks. It's Bush Time, and it's
jamming.

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