'Giuliani Time' an Unflattering Film

[rpgamerd00d]

By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer Tue Apr 25, 6:55 PM ET

NEW YORK - With Rudy Giuliani considering a run for president in 2008, a documentary aimed at tearing down his Churchillian image since Sept. 11 is about to be released.

Premiering next month, "Giuliani Time" turns a critical lens on the former mayor's controversial tenure in New York before his reassuring leadership in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks elevated his reputation.

"I'm not claiming there's anything approaching objectivity about this film," director Kevin Keating said in an interview. "It's a corrective to the perception of Rudy and the miracle of crime reduction in New York, Rudy and the miracle of 9/11."

more... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060425/ap_on_re_us/giuliani_documentary
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Good news for us.

Please DU this article (Recommend it)

[npincus]

1. it's about time someone took a dump on his halo

GOOD.

[Jack from Charlotte]

19. Didn't the guy live in Mayor's mansion with his girlfried while still ...

married to someone else?

[npincus]

22. no, but he might as well have.

He was openly dating her, squiring her about town... spending time (Thanksgiving, included) with her (Judith Nathan, his current wife) instead of his family. He announced his seperation at a press conference (before telling his wife) and thanked his "good friend" Judith Nathan for supporting him during his illness (prostate cancer). BTW, he was rumored to have been screwing his communications director before his affair with Nathan.

Nice guy. A regular GOP morality poster-boy.

[LeftNYC]

2. Im glad this is being made

Giuliani will be hiding behind his supposed "heroism" on 9/11 for the rest of his life, but those of us who have been in this area pre-9/11 know the real Giuliani

[npincus]

9. makes me f+cking sick to my stomach...

the man is lionized for DOING HIS JOB, anointed Saint Rudy of 9-11, and he turned his Sainthood into a cottage industry... his speaking fees racked in 8 millin bucks in the year post-9-11.

The days when (agree with the man's politics or disagree) he was his own person and not a GOP marionette- seem so far off.... as when he endorsed Cuomo over Pataki (slimy Al D'Amoto's boy) for NY Gov.

Most of my friends hated him when he was mayor, but I will confess grudging admiration for how he stood up to organized crime- how he kicked them out of Fulton Market, the Javits Convention Center, the San Gennaro Festival.

Now I think he's the lowest form of life, exploiting our national tragedy for his own financial and politcal gain. He makes me sick.

[AlCzervik]

3. i wonder if this movie will talk about the radios, some of the police

and firefighters family are very angry about the radios Rudy wouldn't buy, i remember seeing protests with signs reading "What about the radios Rudy?" when the 9/11 commission was meeting.

[BrklynLiberal]

10. That is right! If he had been doing the right thing all those men might

not have perished!!!!

[AlCzervik]

11. the radio never got much traction but i bet if he is running it will

be front and center for many new yorkers.

[BrklynLiberal]

12. New Yorkers would not elect him dogcatcher at this point!

He has outlived his legend.

[adigal]

14. The police had better radios

The firefighters had terrible radios. My husband (who was working that day, he was a NYC firefighter) said that they had known about the radios for years, but nothing had been done. Thus, when the evacuate call went out, the police got it, and the firemen never got their call.

This is the reason so many more firemen than police officers died that day. Cops were in that building and around the perimeter too. They just got out in time.

[mdmc]

4. i hope that he runs in 2008 for pres

[BrklynLiberal]

5. Any film that told the truth would be unflattering.

[renate]

6. All I know about Giuliani is 1) 9/11 and 2) he cheated on his wife

I don't live in New York, so please forgive my ignorance if he did egregiously wrong things as mayor that I simply haven't heard about.

I have heard that he's pro-choice and I think I've heard that he's pro-gay marriage, or at least pro-civil unions.

So if a pro-choice, pro-gay rights Republican runs in 2008, isn't that an okay thing?

[BrklynLiberal]

8. He is a hypocrite who would take away your civil rights just as easily

as an anti-gay-rights, anti-gay-marriage Republican.

I lived in NYC while he was mayor, and believe me, it was not as wonderful as his supporters would have you believe.

Here is a quote from the article:

Giuliani, who served two terms as mayor from 1994 to 2002, is depicted as a Machiavellian hothead who allowed police to trample civil liberties — particularly those of blacks, artists and welfare recipients — in the name of maintaining public order.

[Cha]

21. I was in a cab in NYC in Jan

2001 and I know the cab driver didn't like him :)

[JHB]

13. Is he still an "okay thing" when you consider...

Budget-wise, he has a lot in common with W (as governor and president):
The surpluses “afforded the city a golden opportunity to get on the path toward long-term fiscal stability. The opportunity has been squandered,” said McCall. “Instead, on the heels of unprecedented prosperity, the city faces the prospect of service cuts. That’s simply inexcusable.”

Giuliani spent his surplus in two ways. First, on projects he thought would help him win his Senate campaign in 2000 against Hillary Clinton. And then on polishing his legacy in his final year, after he pulled out of the Senate race. Most of the current budget deficit is Giuliani’s responsibility. Tax cuts he enacted since 1995 — benefiting mainly the wealthy — cost the city $2.2 billion. He added 25,000 employees to the city’s payroll, including thousands of patronage hires that came from political leaders he was allied with.

The Housing Authority and Dept. of General Services became notorious as patronage dumping grounds, and he installed a patronage dispenser right in City Hall.

Giuliani used fiscal tricks to dump the costs onto future generations. City Comptroller William Thompson told me: “About $2.5 billion of the city’s $5 billion budget deficit in fiscal 2002 was attributable to Giuliani. He rolled over the debt each year and funded the projects and programs he thought would benefit him politically.” During Giuliani’s term as mayor, total city debt rose by more than half to about $42 billion in loans outstanding, making us the biggest debtor in the nation outside the federal government.

more at http://www.dc37.net/news/PEP/3_2003/surplus.html

As for police abuse: Ask Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Anthony Baez, or a host of others who all managed to run afoul of a few "bad apples", or who Rudy pesonally attacked to defend the officers who attacked or killed them.

On dropping crime:
The statistic in burglary that has gone down dramatically, by 90 percent under Giuliani, is this victimless attempted forced burglary. In one year, 1996, it went from thirty thousand to four thousand. This is unparalleled anywhere else in the United States. It went from 41 percent of all burglaries to three percent of all burglaries.

And how did it happen? When you call a precinct and tell them, "Somebody tried to break into my house. Come over and take a look," they will tell you, "We don't do that anymore. If you want to report an attempted forced burglary come to the precinct." There is no insurance claim to file, so people don't go to the precinct. That is why that statistic dropped off the books of the City of New York.

This is how the crime stats have been manipulated. Rudy Giuliani is not a management expert, he is a statistical expert. He has jimmied every number we live by. This is not to say that crime has not declined, and has not declined dramatically, in the Giuliani era. But is he responsible for the margin of difference between that decline in New York and the decline in other major urban areas? He is not. And he has tricked us into thinking that he is.
...
It is not just issues of police abuse. Under Giuliani, black employment in city government reversed a decades long trend of slow and gradual growth. We actually saw a significant decline in black employment in all city agencies. During the greatest increase in the police department in the course of any administration, and a police exam that had produced the largest number of blacks and Latinos who passed, the Giuliani administration threw out the results of the exam as they began to hire. The fire department, where 95 percent of the supervisors were white when Rudy Giuliani took office, got even whiter. In the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is supposed to examine instances of police abuse, black staff declined by 49 percent between 1995 and 1999. Above all, no one knows what happened to the 600,000 people, mostly minority, who have been knocked off the welfare rolls in course of the Giuliani era. Nobody knows how many of them got jobs. The workfare program was used to knock people off of welfare. People were kicked off welfare if they missed a day, if they came in late. That was the primary purpose of the workfare program, because there was certainly no training. There was certainly no job placement. The New York Times reported that only 3.5 percent of a thousand welfare recipients that it sampled got permanent jobs.
more at http://www.gothamgazette.com/commentary/91.barrett.shtml

[mconvente]

16. I always knew Giuliani was a weasel

Did people forget his abhorent relationship with the blacks of NYC just because of 9/11? I think the majority of you (well, at least in the NYC tri-state area) know what the title "Giuliani Time" is referring too - and it's nothing something pretty...

[shance]

7. I love as well, how they attempt to imply that Churchill was such a great

leader.

There are far too many learning the truth about Winston Churchill, and it's not the pretty picture that has so often been painted.

Perhaps Guiliani and the real Churchill are more alike than we realize.

[BlueStater]

15. Good

The truth about this worm needs to be known.

[no_hypocrisy]

17. Google these people and Giuliani and decide if he's fit to hold office:

1. Patrick Dorisman
2. Amidou Diallo (also spelled Amadou)
3. Abner Louima

These men were either killed or maimed by NYC police officers and Giuliani stood up for the cops every time.

[HamdenRice]

18. Giuliani: The most dangerous man in America; worse than Bush

It is utterly amazing what people outside of New York don't know about Giuliani. If he were ever to become president or worse, Director of Homeland Security, you could kiss the constitution good bye.

Whereas Bush is a doofus, too stupid to understand what the constitution is about, Giuliani knows exactly what it is, and worked consciously in New York to over turn the system of rights and liberties.

I don't have time to go into everything now, but suffice it to say that one of the main "crime fighting" tools that Giuliani used was simply to arrest everybody. Toward the latter part of his administration, the newspapers did a study and found that several hundred thousand black men had been "tossed" -- that is thrown on the ground or against a wall by undercover police officers and searched -- with no probable cause or reasonable suspicion, and that the results were just a few hundred arrests. Trust me, I know, I was one of them. You may not have been afraid of muggers, but you were very likely to be roughed up by the police for no reason at all and only told later that they were police. The killings of Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond and Anthony Baez and others has to be seen as a symptom of the broader process that was going on -- namely the police roughing up the entire population as though the city was a prison and the police were the prison guards. By the end of his administration, little old white lady doctor's wives visiting the city from Westchester for the afternoon, were being tossed, and thrown in jail for 24 hours for no reason whatsoever. Trust me, I know one.

It was a bizarre time. It was like living in a concentration camp. That's what Rudy plans for all of America.

[Cha]

20. I read about this on buzzflash

this morning..so happy it's over here on DU.

rudy is a profiteer of 9/11 and needs to be exposed for the "arrogant gop tyrant" that he is!