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An open letter to all members of
the New York City Council
On Thursday 3/25/99 at 1 P.M. there will be a hearing on Intro. #511, the
proposed new vending bill.
Some of you have recently distinguished yourselves by taking a stand against
the Mayor and his evolving police state. You allowed yourselves to be arrested
to protest the killing of a West African street vendor, Amadou Diallo. For that
brief act of symbolic resistance I offer you my thanks and that of the City’s
thousands of vendors. Now however, you are called upon to do something that
will take courage of a different kind.
One can be certain that as a black street vendor, Mr. Diallo’s persecution
by the Giuliani police state did not abruptly begin the night he was shot 41
times. Vendors, especially black vendors, are all too familiar with the repressive
tactics, racism and violence that distinguish this administration.
Intro. #511 and the corresponding closings of more than 100 streets recently
passed by the Mayor’s panel of appointees proposes to do to all vendors what
the street crimes unit did to Mr. Diallo. Intro. #511 is a death warrant for
vendors.
Like many of the laws and policies the Mayor and City Council have previously
crafted to benefit powerful corporate and real estate interests, this bill is
profoundly unfair, riddled with illegalities and violates basic principles of
the U.S. Constitution. During the past two years in which this bill was being
written I’ve discussed it with Council Members, lawyers for the Council and
the heads of some of the City’s most powerful B.I.D.s (Business Improvement
Districts). Many of them have candidly admitted to me and to others that this
bill was written by the B.I.D.s, that everyone involved knows it is unconstitutional
and that it blatantly violates free speech and equal protection.
Let me take their candid admission a step further. This bill is profoundly
racist and anti-immigrant. One need only take a brief walk outside your tax-payer
funded offices on Broadway, Chambers Street or City Hall to see who this bill
is designed to target. African-American veterans selling books about Martin
Luther King, the history of slavery and African culture. Elderly Chinese women
unable to get a below minimum wage job in an illegal Chinatown sweatshop selling
hair combs and stockings. Middle Eastern immigrants who’ve invested their life
savings in a cart selling coffee and donuts. Street artists from a hundred different
nations selling art to low income and minority New Yorkers who are sneered at
if they visit a SoHo or 57th Street art gallery.
The Council Members most closely associated with this bill, Fisher, Freed and
Wiener are a rouges gallery of real estate interest employees. Ex-Council Member
Wiener, who publicly claimed that because his name is Wiener he’s, “the best
friend a hot dog vendor could have”, told me after we did an interview with
Bill Beutel on channel 7 that the main reason he was involved in this bill was,
“to keep food vendors from setting up in my district”. Council Member Freed
is simultaneously known as the most anti-vendor member of the City Council,
as an anti-Asian racist and as a vicious persecutor of the City’s street artists.
Freed and her vigilante “activist” group, the SoHo Alliance, tried to eliminate
all First Amendment protection for visual art as a means to eliminate street
artists from her district. Just a few days ago Council Member Fisher held a
press conference proposing to make it illegal to take cardboard, newspapers,
magazines and cans out of the garbage, giving the NYPD yet another absurd reason
to arrest homeless people needing cardboard for beds, street artists making
protest signs to denounce the Mayor and the hundreds of black New Yorkers that
make an honest living selling used magazines and books on the street.
If you take the time to read Intro #511 rather than blindly accepting the assurances
of its sponsors, you’ll find that it does nothing whatsoever to help actual
vendors or the public. Besides the B.I.D.s, the only people it does help are
multiple permit food vending corporations that spent years lobbying the bill’s
sponsors. Every single clause in this bill is carefully tailored to unfairly
benefit these food vending monopolies at the expense of independent vendors.
Behind the scene the Mayor, his flunkies in the Department of Finance, the
B.I.D.s, and the publishers of two newspapers that started B.I.D.s have manipulated
the media to portray these food vending corporations as the “representatives”
and “leaders” of the City’s thousands of vendors. Nothing could be further from
the truth. They are despised by the City’s vendors as was evident on 3/16/99
when, without the support of street artists, general vendors or the vast majority
of food vendors they held a “rally” attended by only 40 people. Among the 40
who did attend at least half admitted they did not support these “leaders” and
knew they were being sold out. Some City Council Members that I know to be among
the few advocates for the poor and minorities in City government were tricked
into appearing at a press conference on the steps of City Hall with these “leaders”.
You’ve previously been sent, by e-mail, a point by point analysis of Intro.
#511. You can find it on the website listed below and another copy of it will
follow this letter. On behalf of the City’s more than 20,000 vendors, 90% of
whom are minorities and more than half of whom are black, I urge you to look
deeply into your souls before voting to support this bill in any form.
It is hypocrisy of the rankest kind to stand up against the murder of one vendor,
Amadou Diallo, while supporting the elimination of thousands of his brother
and sister vendors from the City’s public streets. Do the right thing and vote
against Intro. #511.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
255 13th Street
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215
(718) 369-2111
e mail ARTISTpres@aol.com
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
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