New York Times - December 20, 1999
GIULIANI'S NEW MISSION: GET MARXISTS OFF STREETS By John Kifner
A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the swift collapse of communism's Evil Empire, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is still darkly wary of Marxist influence in the nooks and crannies of the city.
The mayor's latest encounter with the Red Menace came as he faced down the threatened strike from the Transport Workers Union and its dissident faction, the New Directions Caucus.
"There are people who want to cause anarchy," the mayor warned at a City Hall news conference last week after a tentative agreement was announced. "I know a week ago I said that Marxism unfortunately is still alive in parts of New York City even in the latter part of this century, even though it's been disgraced all over the world."
Mr. Giuliani's vigilance in this matter has sometimes been overlooked in the hurly-burly of daily governance, but a review of his public statements shows that he has discerned a sinister Marxist tinge to a wide variety of enemies, from the paradoxically well-organized anarchists who sacked a Starbucks in Seattle to the gardeners who plant flowers in the city's vacant lots.
"The remarks of one of the leaders of New Directions is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, where he advocated taking away profits from business as being one of the really good side benefits of having a strike," Mr. Giuliani said. "I think he said he would take away the profit orgy of Christmas from businesses."
He was apparently referring to Tim Schermerhorn, a leader of the New Directions Caucus, who said, in threatening a strike: "The real powers that be in the city -- business -- is planning an orgy of profit-making. They're not going to rake it in if the trains aren't running."
That, the mayor said, "means taking jobs away from people. It means seeing unemployment go up. It means really hurting people who need the most help. And it's a true misunderstanding of what America is all about. That comes from the influence of Marxism, and if you need any better indication of it, it was said at a Marxist study group.
"So philosophy is important. It has done a tremendous amount of good things to help people, and the isms and ideologies of this century have cost an awful lot of human lives," the mayor concluded.
Mr. Giuliani expanded his horizon to foreign affairs last week, bearding Fidel Castro, that stubborn Communist holdout, by urging asylum for Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old found clutching an inner tube off Florida after his mother and stepfather drowned fleeing Cuba.
There was even consideration at City Hall, later dropped, of inviting him to the New Year's Eve celebration.
"I think unfortunately and tragically Castro has become a romanticized figure in America," Mr. Giuliani said.
When the nonprofit Parks Council said that the growing reliance on private fund-raising for maintenance and repairs meant that greenswards in wealthy areas -- like Central Park -- got better services than those in poorer neighborhoods, Mr. Giuliani was not fooled that the 90-year-old council was composed of prominent blue bloods and even a top fund-raiser for George W. Bush.
"That's the rich-and-the-poor knee-jerk reaction," the mayor said. ''It probably comes out of spending some time in school in the 40's or 50's studying Marxism or something."
The council's position "comes out of a very, very extreme radical political outlook on the world in which you were taught to look at things that way, and you just see them that way no matter what the facts are," Mr. Giuliani said in October.
Earlier this year, the mayor tried to sell developers more than 100 city-owned lots that neighborhood groups had transformed from garbage-strewn wrecks into flowering mini-parks, declaring, "This is a free-market economy; welcome to the era after communism." Protesters dressed as ladybugs and plants descended on City Hall, including a man in sunflower garb who took up a perch in a ginkgo tree.
The dispute was resolved only by last-minute divine intervention, in the person of Bette Midler, who bought some of the most endangered lots.
More recently, he said at a gathering of big capitalists, er, business leaders, that the unruly demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle indicate "the remaining damage that Marxism has done to the thinking of people.
You know we have it in the city and the influence that it's had on universities and thinking and the idea of class warfare."
The mayor explained later, at a City Hall news conference, that his remarks at the "21" Club, the famous gathering spot of the ruling class, oops, the rich and powerful, were meant to examine "the whole notion of class warfare, which really comes out of the teaching of Karl Marx, trying to divide people into different classes." He did not elaborate on his reference to the city's universities.
Mayor Giuliani has said he intends to deliver a speech for the new millennium in which he will discuss "the influence of isms and ideology on the kind of violence we've had in this century. Just because we're in the latter part of the century doesn't mean the perversions of those philosophies don't affect it."
Stay tuned.