[gotta love all the 'er' and 'oops' bullshit. who said the
NYT doesn't have a sense of humor?]
<http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/
regional/ny-marxists-streets.html>
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.