1/1/99 Giuliani Rehearses His Troops in Preparation for Year 2000 Corporate Police State

From: ARTISTpres@aol.com

Many people consider the quality of their New Year’s Eve to be a harbinger of things to come in the next year. If that’s true, the people of New York City will have a lot to worry about in 1999. 1998 was the year in which Mayor Giuliani began experimenting with the widespread use of police barricades, arbitrary searches and closing off entire public sections of the City to anyone without the proper credentials. Free speech was pretty much limited to people who, after their lawyers sued the City in Federal Court to obtain a permit, were willing to stand trapped inside a maze of police barricades surrounded by an army of heavily armed police while being videotaped by NYPD Intelligence and buzzed by police helicopters. Surveillance cameras installed in hundreds of public spaces and the threat of our DNA being routinely sampled were just some of the Mayor’s many ideas to improve quality of life. As Commissioner Safir repeatedly explained, last night’s New Year’s celebration in Times Square which involved 5,000 cops, the closing off of 40 square blocks to pedestrian and vehicular traffic and massive illegal searches of pedestrians for alcohol was just a, “rehearsal” for events in the year to come. A rehearsal indeed.

What are we rehearsing for? A corporate-sponsored police state. Anything and everything that big business wants will be provided. Mayor Giuliani will continue to attack what he calls “knee-jerk” ideas like free speech, freedom of movement and privacy because these rights limit both the government’s and big business’s ability to control us. Satisfying corporate interests will continue to be the Mayor’s preoccupation as he turns over more and more of the City’s resources to Steinbrenner, Trump, the NYSE, Disney and the real estate interests that are his accomplices. Middle class and low income New Yorkers will increasingly find themselves encouraged to step aside or just leave the City to make way for more tourists (34 million visited New York City this past year), the super wealthy and giant corporations.

You’ve got to admire the Mayor’s nerve as you hear him oppose sprinklers in apartment buildings (it would cost landlords too much money) while giving away billions of tax dollars in corporate welfare. He wasn’t kidding when he said on 12/31/98, “I don't really care what my public image is.” He’s banking on being the necessary poster boy for the police state, the iron fist that can beat down the underclass, save us from terrorists and remake the whole world into Disney’s Magic Kingdom. In times of uncertainty people often turn to someone like Rudolph Giuliani, as the German people did in 1933. Let’s hope we can learn something from history and not make that kind of mistake again.

Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
(718) 369-2111
e mail ARTISTpres@aol.com
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html

[Excerpts from NY Times 1/1/99, “Times Square Revelers Raise an Orderly Ruckus for 1999”

An expected crowd of half a million, held in check by more than 5,000 police officers, gathered in midtown to watch the big aluminum ball make its final trip down the big aluminum pole...To accommodate the crowds last night, the police shut down more than 40 square blocks to car traffic -- from 38th Street north to Central Park at 59th Street, and from Eighth Avenue east to the Avenue of the Americas. Blocks were closed to pedestrian traffic as they filled up, 10,000 people at a time...Access to subways along the way was limited, if not cut off. ..At all of the access points into the party area, plainclothes and uniformed police officers searched revelers for alcohol, confiscated bottles in brown paper bags and wrote dozens of citations... "They force you to go every way that you don't want to," Rod Batiste said, "and now we're lost and confused. How do I get back to the subway?"...But others unable to get to the center of the action -- probably a vast majority this year -- found the show of police force as impressive as anything else..."We can't get through because of the barriers, but I'm very impressed with the police," said Gaudin Wilfrid, a school bus driver in his 20's from Nantes, France, on vacation with his girlfriend. "I've only seen this many at a student strike in Paris.".. Some people in Times Square had actually been drawn there by the display of crowd control, which police officials said was intended as a dress rehearsal of sorts for the end-of-the-century celebration next year...Damien Villa, a 15-year-old who said he plans to go into law enforcement, was among them. He drove up with his father from Gaffney, S.C... "My wife said: 'He's only 15; do you want to take him out in an environment like that?' " the boy's father, Jerry Villa, said..."I said: 'Look, he's had two years of karate, he's interested in criminal law, maybe in becoming a police officer and then a lawyer. This would be a good place to see how they do it.' ..."As Damien was asking one officer how he kept his cool in the midst of chaos, the officer demonstrated by politely defusing a woman who likened the police to Nazis..."We worked our way across 44th Street, but at each block we had to explain where we were going," said an exasperated Mrs. Klein. "We were frustrated. We just didn't expect this to be that much of a problem."]

Last updated: January 2, 2005