Police brutality, US Terror, Giuliani The WE News Archives

A piece on Giuliani but really a piece on New York.

New York, New York, everyone in the world wants to go!

A piece on America?

Surely the America you know? And love?

A piece on the Terror State?

Do you recognise it?

It is a nation that chooses not to care for its poor.

To have a disparity of wealth that gets increasingly wider.

Is this how you will spend the rest of your 24's?

Hand to posterity — your legacy of your time?

My God!

Perhaps?

And weariness, submission, acceptance —

U.S. Terror State:

He spoke at a police “protest” — in reality, a drunken brawl of white cops — held on the steps of City Hall against the establishment
of a civilian complaint review board

The truth about Giuliani

JENNIFER ROESCH May 11, 2007 | Page 5

WITH THE Bush presidency in a free-fall and Republicans scrambling to find a candidate with as little connection as possible to the White House, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is back at center stage.

Despised in New York as a lame-duck mayor through much of his second term, Giuliani today is leading in opinion polls among contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.

Giuliani’s popularity is the result of the September 11 attacks in New York.

That year, Time magazine declared him its “Person of the Year,” and he became known as “America’s mayor.”

He projected an image of a tough but compassionate leader who would unite New Yorkers and “heal the wounds” of a traumatized city.

Another aspect of Giuliani’s appeal is his carefully nurtured image as a moderate on social issues — especially gay rights and a woman’s right to choose abortion — an aberration in a Republican Party where the Religious Right seems to call the shots.

This image has been aided by a compliant media that paints Giuliani as able to reach across partisan lines to provide leadership in times of crisis.

The reality could not be more different — and Giuliani’s reign as mayor of New York proves it.

Racist backlash against African American Mayor David Dinkins

In 1993, Giuliani rode to power on the wave of a racist backlash against African American Mayor David Dinkins.

Once in office, Giuliani was unapologetic in appealing to racist stereotypes to drive through his policies.

Burning US taxpayer money

During his time as mayor, Giuliani led a racist war on working and poor New Yorkers that slashed social services, threw women and children off welfare, attacked union rights and spurred an epidemic of police brutality.

Giuliani has made it clear that he intends to carry this “tough on crime” agenda — now repackaged as “tough on terrorism” — into the presidential campaign.

In a recent New Hampshire appearance, he took a page out of Dick Cheney’s book, suggesting that the U.S. would be more vulnerable to a terrorist attack if the Democrats were elected.

“If one of them gets elected, it sounds to me like we’re going on the defense,” he said.

“We’ve got a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

We’re going to wave the white flag there.

We’re going to try to cut back on the Patriot Act.

We’re going to cut back on electronic surveillance.

We’re going to cut back on interrogation.

We’re going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we’ll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense.”

Another carryover from the Giuliani years in New York City is his blatant appeal to racism.

While campaigning in the South, this “social moderate” defended flying the Confederate flag as an issue of “state’s rights” — the rallying cry of the Jim Crow South 40 years ago.

Abner Louima sodomized by police

As for his supposedly liberal credentials on social issues, Giuliani has shown that he is willing to shift positions to appease a right-wing audience.

For example, while he has long been known as a supporter of abortion rights, Giuliani recently backed the Supreme Court decision upholding a federal ban on a late-term abortion procedure misnamed “partial birth abortion” by the right.

Giuliani says that if he were president, he would appoint “strict constructionist” judges — a phrase that many consider code for overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

Cop killed squeegee man because he was a criminal

IF ANYONE wants to know what a Giuliani presidency would really look like, they should go back to his years as mayor of New York during the 1990s.

Giuliani is credited with an urban renewal in NYC that cut crime rates and revived the economy and tourism.

While he did create a Disneyland version of NYC, complete with a redeveloped Times Square and booming Wall Street, the reality of what happened to working-class and poor New Yorkers during his time in office is a much darker story.

Giuliani came to power in the context of a racially divided city.

During his election campaign, he spoke at a police “protest” — in reality, a drunken brawl of white cops — held on the steps of City Hall against the establishment of a civilian complaint review board.

Complete and unapologetic support for the NYPD became a hallmark of his tenure.

As soon as he took office, Giuliani announced a “quality of life” campaign, claiming that by going after small-time offenses, the city would be able to root out more violent crimes.

The symbol of this campaign was Giuliani’s plan to drive “squeegee men” — homeless people who wiped windshields at traffic stops for money—from NYC streets.

Giuliani’s cops went after them with a ruthlessness that foreshadowed much greater brutality to come.

As the campaign got underway, an off-duty cop shot and killed an unarmed “squeegee man” — and defended his actions on the basis that the man was a “criminal.”

Treating misdemeanors as equal to more serious crimes meant ratcheting up the level of violence and repression in poor, minority communities.

The underlying assumption of the new “stop and frisk” policy was that all Blacks and Latinos were potential criminals.

A report by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer found that Latinos were stopped 39 percent more often than whites under the policy, and Blacks were stopped 23 percent more often.

The year before Giuliani took office, 720 people were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana-related offenses; by 2000, the number had jumped to 59,495—an increase of 4,549 percent.

During a 10-month period in 1996, 50,000 people detained on misdemeanors were strip-searched by the Department of Corrections.

These kinds of aggressive policies gave a green light to the NYPD to terrorize Black and Latino communities.

Giuliani called officers congratulating them for killing

When unarmed cousins Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega were shot in the back and killed while they lay face down on the floor in 1995, Giuliani called the officers [NYPD officers Patrick Brosnan and James Crowe, former bodyguards of mayor Rudolph Giuliani] and congratulated them on their performance.

When Anthony’s mother, Margarita Rosario, began organizing in protest, Giuliani told her that her son died because she was a bad mother.

This attitude was exemplified most starkly when cops tortured and sodomized Abner Louima in a Brooklyn police station in 1997.

Even after the killing of Amadou Diallo — shot 41 times in the hallway of his building in 1999 — Giuliani maintained his defense of the police and his opposition to any kind of reform of the NYPD.

Giuliani and his supporters defended these actions by claiming that “tough on crime” policies were crucial to a decline in crime statistics.

But a look at the statistics shows that the drop in crime began 36 months before Giuliani took office — while Dinkins was still mayor.

In fact, the 1990s saw a national reduction in crime, due largely to demographic and economic changes.

Giuliani cut funding for schools, social services, cutting taxes for wealthy

IN REALITY, the dramatic escalation of repression was needed to manage a city that saw an expansion of economic and social polarization during the Giuliani era.

Despite the Wall Street boom of the 1990s, living standards for working class and poor New Yorkers actually declined. By 2000, one in four New Yorkers lived in poverty — basically the same rate as during the 1989-1992 recession a decade before, and nearly double the national average.

That same year, New York’s homeless population reached its highest point since 1989, and the city had a shortfall of 390,000 affordable housing units for low-income renters.

These statistics were the result of deliberate policies on the part of the Giuliani administration.

Throughout successive budgets, Giuliani cut funding for municipal employees, schools and other social services, while cutting taxes for the wealthy and Wall Street.

Some of the most devastating attacks came through Giuliani’s restructuring of the local welfare system.

In one of the most sweeping attacks on recipients, Giuliani converted welfare offices to “job centers,” introduced “workfare” requirements, cut funding and actively discouraged and prevented poor people from getting the benefits they were entitled to.

WEP workers made $1.80 an hour

In 1994, 27 percent of applicants were rejected from welfare.

By November 1999, 75 percent of job center applicants and 52 percent of applicants overall were rejected.

In the four years following welfare reform, the food stamp rolls were reduced by 35 percent.

These figures weren’t the result of recipients moving off welfare into new jobs.

In fact, of the first 5,300 people to enter the city’s job search program, only 265 people were placed.

Instead, people were forced off the rolls and into the Work Experience Program (WEP) to perform previously unionized jobs at sweatshop wages.

Thus, between 1991 and 1999, the WEP workforce in the Parks Department grew from 170 to 2,389, while regular Parks employees dropped from 4,285 to 2,101.

WEP workers in the Parks Department made $1.80 an hour — compared to an average wage for Parks employee of $8.65.

At the same time, 13,000 students in the CUNY public education system were forced out of college and into workfare programs.

Numerous investigations uncovered the cruel methods used to cut the rolls.

Centers 'losing' food stamp applications

At one point, a scandal erupted when it was discovered that welfare centers were “losing” food stamp applications —thus, making it impossible for recipients to apply.

Giuliani’s treatment of the homeless was equally callous.

At one point, he housed homeless applicants for emergency shelter — including children — in a former jail.

During his administration, spending on affordable housing was cut by 44 percent, and the creation of apartments for the homeless declined by 75 percent.

At the same time, police conducted aggressive sweeps to keep the homeless off city streets and out of view.

The real legacy of “Giuliani time” is a city where Wall Street executives celebrate enormous bonuses with spectacular meals, washed down with trophy wines — while the poor are increasingly pushed to the margins.

A city whose tourist centers glitter while service cuts leave garbage to accumulate on the streets of working-class neighborhoods.

A city where the NYPD’s thugs in blue continue to terrorize minority communities.

At a time when a majority of Americans believe that the war in Iraq should end and more money should be spent on vital social services, Giuliani would represent a return to the heyday of the “Republican Revolution”: a war on the poor that threw women and children into the streets, civil liberties gutted, and “tough on crime” policies that devastated Black and Latino communities.

Mothers of Invention

The families of police-brutality victims build a movement

by Andrew Hsiao & Deirdre Hussey

March 31 - April 6, 1999

Iris Baez
Andrew Lichtenstein

Camped around a small table and crowded by a forest of filing cabinets, a dozen people met in the Manhattan offices of the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights last week — as they do every week — to share a similar heartbreak.

Each had lost a son or a brother to police violence, but the talk was practical.

Three types of strangulation

One mother spoke matter-of-factly about the "three types of strangulation."

Another talked lawsuits.

Still another recounted a pathologist's report that her son:

"did have a slow death.

It's been bothering me ever since."

Like a New York version of the Argentinian mothers of the disappeared, the mothers and sisters of police-brutality victims have become a ubiquitous and heart-wrenching presence at protests, rallies, and teach-ins.

But while their public role has not fundamentally altered the largely male iconography of the police-brutality controversy — that macho world certainly has room for women as grieving mothers — behind the scenes these women and their families have become leaders of a citywide movement.

"We need to take advantage of this moment," said one person at the table.

"But even if this fades, we'll be here. The mothers and families will be here."

Margarita Rosario

"When I hear of a loss, I get the address of the family, then I get some mothers together and we knock on the front door," says Margarita Rosario.

The house call is for consolation, but inevitably "we talk about the fight."

It is part of what Rosario does instinctually, as often as three times a month.

Family by family, Rosario has slowly built a movement, founded on the death of her son.

In January 1995, 18-year-old Anthony Rosario was shot 14 times in a Bronx apartment.

Her nephew, Hilton Vega, was also killed.

Shot lying facedown

When the police version of their deaths was contradicted by witnesses, who said Anthony was shot lying facedown, Margarita Rosario and Vega's mother, Carmen Morales, became their own detectives.

Eventually, they reached out to parents like Lilian Flores, whose son was killed by a Street Crime Unit officer exactly one year after Anthony.

"We gave ourselves a name just to have a name," says Rosario.

"Then calls started. Press, families: It turned out to be something the community needed."

That group, Parents Against Police Brutality, has guided almost 100 victims.

"I didn't think we were starting a movement, I just felt we had to make it real."

Kevin Cedeno shot in back while fleeing police.
Grand jury decided police were justified

Keeping families in the fight when few results have been produced is the hardest part.

The two officers involved in Anthony Rosario's death have not faced criminal charges.

"Parents lose faith, communities move on. Sometimes the family gets angry, sometimes they give up."

"It hurts," says Rosario, but she and her family remain defiant — her husband, Antonio, plans to attend law school.

"When you start a movement you have no other choice but to continue," she adds, "Because when another case happens, you feel it deep inside."

Iris Baez

Iris Baez rattles off names as if they are her own sons — Kevin (Cedeno), Nicholas (Heyward), Charles (Campbell).

Sitting at the kitchen table, she points to photos of young men on her wall and recalls the details: how they died, if the cop faced charges, how the parents are coping.

She has spent four years documenting police misconduct, from news reports on television to people who arrive on her doorstep because they heard she would help.

Her latest project — undertaken through the Anthony Baez Foundation, which she founded in her son's name — is tracking the careers of cops with the most notorious brutality records.

Died after illegal chokehold

In 1994, 29-year-old Anthony died after officer Francis Livoti put him in an illegal chokehold.

At the time, Livoti had several civilian complaints against him and was under supervision for aggressive behavior.

"Sometimes if a cop has a complaint, NYPD transfers the cop to another precinct," says Baez.

"I want communities to know their cops, the good and the bad."

Baez has become synonymous with protest of police brutality.

She has lectured high school students on avoiding confrontations with police and has traveled to campuses handing out literature on the Constitution.

Last week she was honored — along with Margarita Rosario — by the City Council.

The mother of 11 children — five adopted — she praises her husband, "who takes care of the children when I am at rallies."

And sometimes, when a week has been particularly hectic, Baez makes an escape.

She calls up Margarita Rosario, who lives just a few blocks away.

"We drive to City Island. Sometimes we have lunch or we just sit on a bench and talk about the memories we have of our sons."

Joyce Huang and Qing Lan Huang

When Qing Lan Huang heard her 16-year-old brother Yong Xin had been killed, her first thought was he'd been shot by someone from the streets of her mostly black and Latino part of Bushwick.

Now, four years later, she has become a constant presence at rallies for racial justice.

On March 24, 1995, Yong Xin was playing with a BB gun in a Sheepshead Bay backyard.

Shot in the back of the head

A police officer was called; he would later claim his gun went off when Yong Xin struggled with him, but an autopsy revealed the teen had been shot in the back of the head.

That the 115-pound honors student would have fought a cop is unfathomable to the boy's family.

"He was so quiet, such a good kid," sighs Joyce.

"And before, we all had the same opinion of the police.

They protect us.

We didn't know anything about police brutality."

The death of their brother upended Joyce and Qing Lan's world.

Because their parents mainly speak the Chinese dialect Toishanese, the burden of translation that immigrant kids shoulder is even weightier as Joyce and Qing Lan spread their family's story — and those of other brutality victims — across the city in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.

But it happened to my brother

This despite the fact, says Qing Lan, that:

"I don't like to speak in front of hundreds of people.

"But it happened to my brother."

The officer has never faced trial, but the city settled a civil suit, prompting the family to fund anti-police-brutality groups like the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence.

"Police brutality," says Joyce, "is happening to every community. It is happening to the Asian community. When Diallo was killed, I was sad, but not surprised. That's why we have to fight back together, every community together."

Evadine Bailey

Abner Louima lives around the corner from Evadine Bailey in East New York.

The family of William Whitfield — shot by cops on Christmas Day, 1997 — lives within three blocks.

Kenneth Boss, who was named in the 1997 Halloween shooting death of Bailey's unarmed 22-year-old son, Patrick, is one of four cops indicted in the Amadou Diallo killing.

"The more stories I hear the more I realize it has to stop," says Bailey.

"And the only way is if parents make it stop."

Barely 18 months since the death of her only son, Bailey has raised her voice at rallies around the city, including a recent protest by the newly formed Women for Justice that drew 500 to City Hall.

"Sometimes it is painful," says Bailey of her new-found activism.

"Sometimes it feels good. I remember Patrick going to the Abner Louima protests."

District attorneys do not like to indict cops

She echoes a complaint made by many parents: "I have heard it over and over, district attorneys do not like to indict cops."

Her family accuses Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes of ignoring witnesses who say officers gunned down Patrick.

Boss's role in the Diallo shooting has brought attention to Patrick's killing and renewed the family's fighting spirit.

Last week, Bailey's husband, Lloyd, was arrested at One Police Plaza, and their 25-year-old daughter, Lorraine, helped to prepare a civil suit against the city.

Says Bailey, "When I meet so many parents and I listen to their stories I just want to cry and never stop. It keeps me going."

Milta Calderon

Milta Calderon smiles as she recounts her arrest at One Police Plaza last week.

In jail, she and a group of women found themselves next to a band of male protesters.

"To our surprise, the men were behaving, and the women were shouting and chanting," she says.

For Calderon, it's been a remarkable journey from grief to activism.

Amadou Diallo shot in back by police
Police fired 41 shots
Acquitted of all charges

Her son, Anibal, was killed by a cop from the Street Crime Unit on January 25, 1995, blocks from her Flatbush home.

For the first few months after her son's death, she recalls, "I wasn't there."

A sister's words pulled her from thoughts of suicide.

"She told me, 'You can't grieve, you have to fight for your son.' "

Calderon, along with her younger son Mario, began canvassing the neighborhood, turning up contradictions in the official version.

The police reported that 21-year-old Anibal was shot after assuming a "shooter's crouch."

Shot in the back

He turned out to be unarmed, and an autopsy showed he had been shot in the back.

"It was hard. Words didn't from my mouth; I didn't say the things I felt," says Calderon.

But the effort kept her going.

"I felt if I wasn't out there, he'd be forgotten."

The police officer who shot Anibal was not indicted.

Still, Mario holds onto his lifelong dream of being a cop.

"Working on the inside, we can make changes," he says.

But his mother now believes "this whole system has to change."

Last week in jail, a police officer asked her, "Do you plan to commit suicide?"

Calderon replied, "No. We have a long way to go to get justice."

Over time I was increasingly shocked by the speed and ease with which many intelligent and seemingly competent members of the CFR [ Council on Foreign Relations ] appeared to eagerly justify policies and actions that supported growing corruption.

The regularity with which many CFR members would protect insiders from accountability regarding another appalling fraud surprised even me.

Many of them seemed delighted with the advantages of being an insider while being entirely indifferent to the extraordinary cost to all citizens of having our lives, health and resources drained to increase insider wealth in a manner that violated the most basic principles of fiduciary obligation and respect for the law.

In short, the CFR was operating in a win-lose economic paradigm that centralized economic and political power.

I was trying to find a way for us to shift to a win-win economic paradigm that was — by its nature — decentralizing.

Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits

The reader can appreciate why Wall Street would welcome someone as accommodating as Gorelick at Fannie Mae.

This was a period when the profits rolled in from engineering the most spectacular growth in mortgage debt in U.S. history.

As one real estate broker said, “They have turned our homes into ATM machines.”

Fannie Mae has been a leading player in centralizing control of the mortgage markets into Washington D.C. and Wall Street.

And that means as people were rounded up and shipped to prison as part of Operation Safe Home, Fannie was right behind to finance the gentrification of neighborhoods.

And that is before we ask questions about the extent to which the estimated annual financial flows of $500 billion–$1 trillion money laundering through the U.S. financial system or money missing from the US government are reinvested into Fannie Mae securities.

Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits

James Forrestal’s oil portrait always hung prominently in one of the private Dillon Read dining rooms for the eleven years that I worked at the firm. Forrestal, a highly regarded Dillon partner and President of the firm, had gone to Washington, D.C. in 1940 to lead the Navy during WWII and then played a critical role in creating the National Security Act of 1947.

He then became Secretary of War (later termed Secretary of Defense) in September 1947 and served until March 28, 1949.

Given the central banking-warfare investment model that rules our planet, it was appropriate that Dillon partners at various times lead both the Treasury Department and the Defense Department.

Shortly after resigning from government, Forrestal died falling out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1949.

There is some controversy around the official explanation of his death — ruled a suicide.

Some insist he had a nervous breakdown. Some say that he was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel.

Others say that he argued for transparency and accountability in government, and against the provisions instituted at this time to create a secrete “black budget.”

He lost and was pretty upset about it — and the loss was a violent one.

Since the professional killers who operate inside the Washington beltway have numerous techniques to get perfectly sane people to kill themselves, I am not sure it makes a big difference.

Approximately a month later, the CIA Act of 1949 was passed.

The Act created the CIA and endowed it with the statutory authority that became one of the chief components of financing the “black” budget — the power to claw monies from other agencies for the benefit of secretly funding the intelligence communities and their corporate contractors.

This was to turn out to be a devastating development for the forces of transparency, without which there can be no rule of law, free markets or democracy.

Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits

What Briody does not mention is allegations regarding Brown & Root's involvement in narcotics trafficking. Former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert once described his break up with fiance Teddy — an agent dealing narcotics and weapons for the CIA while working with Brown & Root, as follows:

“Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly.

She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran.

At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city.

The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.

“The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root.

The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root.

And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days.

Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.”

Source: "Halliburton’s Brown and Root is One of the Major Components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire" by Michael Ruppert, From the Wilderness

Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits

The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering.

Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.

Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine.

Without growing organized crime and military activities through government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing.

The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population.

Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits

Unspeakable grief and horror

...and the circus of deception killing continues...

He says, "You are quite mad, Kewe"

And of course I am.

Why, I don't believe any of it — not the bloody body, not the bloody mind, not even the bloody Universe, or is it bloody multiverse.

"It's all illusion," I say. "Don't you know, my lad, my lassie. The game! The game, me girl, me boy! Takes on interest, don't you know. T'is me sport, till doest find a better!"

Pssssst — but all this stuff is happening down here

Let's change it!

To say hello: hello[the at marker]Kewe.info