Times Sq. 1999: Giuliani rings in a corporate police state

Dear Editor,

The New Year “celebration” in Times Square is the ultimate symbol of what New York City has become under Mayor Giuliani. Corporations and a private business group the Times Square BID, have the City government at their complete disposal aiding and abetting them in exploiting and congesting the entire midtown area while they deny its use or access to the eight million residents and taxpayers of this City. They are given blanket permission to use huge illegal sound systems, dump tons of confetti (aka garbage), shoot off fireworks and create a life threatening situation of congestion in order to promote their business interests. Five thousand bone-chilled cops will be working on overtime for the event which will cost the City millions in additional sanitation, EMS and other expenses. This is the same Times Square where the Mayor recently attempted to deny a small and controversial group of African American preachers the right to use a single loudspeaker or to congregate at all. No group of working class New Yorkers would ever be given a permit to do anything like this event let alone the year 2000 event that the Mayor and his corporate Millennium committee are planning. The crowds congesting Times Sq. will be almost exclusively tourists. No sane New Yorker would want to stand trapped inside a police barricade for four hours in below freezing cold. As the ball drops we should all remember back to a more authentic pre-Giuliani New York, where working people lived and enjoyed the freedoms and diversity that this nation was founded upon.

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

Last updated: January 2, 2005